If anyone ever suggests sausages, I always suggest the perfect complementary dishes of “plants and goldfish”.
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"Bambi"is such a great episode. I rewatched it yesterday and was shocked to see emma thompson and hugh laurie in the credits. I recognized stephen fry as one of the posh kids, but missed the other two.
Yep, those three - along with series collaborator, author, host and stand-up comedian Ben Elton - were the team from Footlights College, Oxbridge.
University Challenge was/is a real show, and was then hosted by Bamber Gascoigne - played here by Griff Rhys-Jones (yes, the whole “Bambi” thing is just a pun on his name) - while the other half of his double-act - Mel Smith - was the security guard who fell for the “bacon sandwich” joke.
“Alas Smith and Jones” (get it?) was a hit show, and they’d previously been part of “Not the Nine O’Clock News” with Rowan Atkinson and Pamela “I’ll be in my Bunk” Stephenson, who was married to Scottish comedy legend Billy Connelly and went on to play the villain’s Mol in Superman 3.
Smith and Jones introduced Queen at Live Aid, and Smith played the albino mute in “The Princess Bride”. Basically, the show is a who’s who of 1980s British comedy.
Here’s a classic NTNON sketch, lampooning an actual TV debate over “Life of Brian”.
I am waiting for the reveal that the Tyrell Corporation is one of the four dominant corporations.
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Holy Shit!
I found this down the NTNON rabbit hole. Could easily be ICE today.
ETA: “SPG” was the Met Police’s “Special Patrol Group” that was meant to be a rapid response force to major incidents but infamously just went around dragging black and brown people into their vans for a good shooeing.
You might recognize the name as it is what Vyvyan called his hamster in The Young Ones.
Star Trek: SNW.
Now that I am back on the Paramount+ app, I watched S3 E1 of Strange New Worlds, which is the conclusion to the two-parter they left us dangling on last season. It was fine, and well made and very well acted and “proper” Trek and left me underwhelmed.
Best of Both Worlds it ain’t (but then that is a very high bar).
Spoilers
There was immense amount of peril for everyone, everywhere; but at the same time you just knew that we weren’t going to lose anyone. A fact they expressed explicitly in the dialog more than once.
Winning the day by ordering the Gorn to sleep may have been intended as an homage, but it just seemed lazy. Also, it seems obvious that this ability is going to be used to have the Gorn appear and disappear as necessary, without having to address them as an ongoing threat in future episodes. Just all a bit too convenient.
I’m caught up on SNW this season but haven’t really cared enough to share thoughts.
Spoilers
This season has been okay. I’m not really digging a lot of the stories they’re telling so far. Too many love stories, stuff with Batel and Ortegas that still hasn’t been paid off multiple episodes into the season. It feels like the writers of Discovery took over the show.
Also, the fact that we are 100% certain of Pike’s future really erodes a lot of the peril that involves him because he doesn’t land in the beep chair for at least another couple of years. Yeah, the Enterprise might blow up when they fly it into the binary stars’ taint… except we know Pike is going to survive it. Similarly, a few episodes later Pike finds himself staring at the business end of an energy rifle, but we know his ticket isn’t about to get punched, and it doesn’t. Doesn’t he know that too?
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Alien: Earth hasn’t jumped the shark, but right now it seems to be stretching in advance of a notable leap.
Spoilers
Wendy can just talk to the aliens? If it’s because she’s a hybrid, then why can’t the others? She is the prototype, so should not be more capable than production models.
Oh, and Joe is now just completely fine.
Ep 5 of Alien: Earth pulled back from the shark jump this week, with the expected “what happened on the Maiginot” flashback episode.
Now, there are some continuity conundrums with this element of the show; notably why the Maiginot set out 65 years ago but is basically the same design/tech as the Nostromo that we have not yet met in the timeline, and how the engineer knew all about Prodigy to explain it to the apprentice (Ep 1) despite having been in chryosleep for a decade or two.
I can get my head around the ship issue, by assuming that the Maiginot was cutting-edge tech when it set off while the Nostromo when we meet her is an old junker. The engineer’s knowledge of current events on earth when he’s been away/asleep for 65 years is just the writers lazily forcing exposition into the script where it didn’t belong (they could’ve achieved the same by having the TV playing while the crew ate in the kitchen).
The episode was chock full o’ callbacks to the original movie. This in itself is a big win for me. But while it answered some questions - like how containment was broken - it left a few more:
Spoilery Theories
The fate of the crew is left unseen. Sure, Morrow declares them all dead, but we don’t even see Zaveri die even though she is attacked by the Xeno. We’re definitely supposed to assume that it killed her, which is why I expect that it’s not the case.
Plus, all the crew in the chryosleep pods could/should be alive seeing as so much of the ship is intact following the crash. It would be weird for them to focus so much on the artificial person’s obsession with that one sleeping crew member only for her to die offscreen.
Also, she’s a smokeshow and wearing Ripley’s underwear set from Aliens, so…
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It’s a lot of fun if you think of Ade Edmondson’s character in Alien: Earth is Vyvyan grown up.
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Why does every Alien effort since Alien 3 think it’s ok to rewrite the lore?
Spoiler
The facehugger falls off Arthur and 5 minutes later his chest is bursting. That’s not how it has ever worked.
Not as bad as Romulus, where the entire three-phase cycle from face hug to Big Chap happened in about 30 minutes, but still just lazy writing.
“Lazy writing” dominates the show. Its a bad first draft and disappointing. There are good elements too…but the lazy/bad writing jars me me out of the world of the show so often that its a challenge to appreciate the show. It’s hard to blame Disney; but the overuse if the lost boys concept is an easy place to start for where it went wrong.
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And by “lore” you mean the basics of the reproduction cycle. If yes, the lore IS consistent…it gestates at the rate most convenient to the plot as conceived by the director.
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Yep. they put a lot of effort into making the thing, but not into writing it. Now that “Wendy” can speak alienese because reasons, I fear that everything going forward (as it was last episode) is going to be solved by Xeno ex Machina.
Also, Wendy being able to control any system by touching a screen is just insanely overpowered even before she can call down an alien on your ass.
I think op wendy is the heart of this season, the true “alien” with emergent episode title properties that is a threat to homo notso sapiens (the perpetual “boy genius” with a terminal case of peter pan syndrome). I respect the scope attempted in the project, but so much seems under considered. The rivalry between the cyborg and synthetic was almost good. Almost.
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Exactly.
In “Alien”, they take a hard landing on the planetoid that requires 17-25 hours of repair work (depending on who you ask). In the meantime, the team goes to the derelict ship.
It’s 2kms away (or 22 football fields for those who will use any measuring system other than metric) so even a a slow walking pace it’s only about 30 minutes away after, say, 30 minutes of suit-up time. Two hours to fuck around at the ship and say an hour to get back carrying Kane, so we’re something like 4 hours since landing with at least an hour of face-hugging time.
While repairs continue, the face hugger falls off Kane. Immediately after that, Dallas orders lift off from the planet despite some of the repairs not being complete. So let’s say that Parker and Brett had done 15 hours of repairs (assuming some breaks and time spent chasing hull-eating acid), we’re looking at say 12 hours for embryo implantation.
The next point in the reproductive cycle is the chest burst. After they’ve taken off from the planet and re-connected to the payload, and after Lambert has done her calculations for the completion of their journey home, Kane wakes up. There is no time reference here, so let’s just say all that shit takes 4 hours (it could be more, it could be less, but no way that all gets done in 5 minutes).
Pretty soon after Kane wakes up, the alien is born. It seems pretty immediate in the film, but Kane has at least had a shower before sitting down for the last supper. But let’s just say it’s a negligible amount of time, so we’re looking at 16 hours for implantation and gestation (presumably gestation starts straight away so the chest burster is growing from minute 1), including 4 hours after the face hugger falls off.
The growth from chest burster to Big Chap has even fewer time references but, between Kane’s death and Brett’s death the following happens:
- They prep Kane’s body for burial in space, presumably after some kind of autopsy that is not shown (but it makes sense that Ash would be all over that);
- They clean up the shitshow in the kitchen area;
- Ash somehow manufactures a couple of motion detectors that key off micro-changes in air density (allegedly);
- Brett manufactures a couple of cattle prods; and
- They search the ship and find the cat.
All of that is going to take time. Potentially days. Especially to make the search tools (which the script makes clear are cobbled together and not off-the-shelf items). Also, they could have been searching for 5 hours or 5 minutes before finding the cat. It’s only, say, 10 minutes in movie run time, but this is not a real-time depiction of events.
So, while the alien’s development cycle is clearly accelerated compared to ours, it’s not like it all took place within the runtime of the fucking movie.
Cameron recognized this when he made Aliens. We know it takes 17 days before a rescue party can reach LV-426 after the distress call is received. We know from dialogue in the Hadley’s Hope deleted scenes that it’s two weeks round trip to get an answer to a question.
So now we know that the colonists were fighting the aliens for at about a month before the marines arrived (as alluded to by Ripley commenting that Newt had stayed alive for longer than 17 days). That is plenty of time for the exponential increase in the alien population to overwhelm the colonists as each encounter would mean -1 colonist and +1 alien.
Alien3, for all its many, many faults is pretty true to the timeline. OK, so the runner alien is born before Ripley’s queen embryo matures despite having been implanted later, but that can be excused by a combination of it being born of animal, not human, and the queen taking longer to mature. Or it’s just a plain old plot convenience and lazy writing on a project where the script was changing daily.
Everything else in the franchise since has so broken the timeline of the reproductive cycle as it makes no sense anymore. Ridley Scott blew it up in Prometheus and now everyone since has taken the liberty granted to them by Scott just to do whatever the fuck they want. EOR.
Fun Fact: Ripley’s arc over the course of the first three movies, to her, happens over the course of a couple of months.
- Alien = 5-7 days
- Sleeps for 57 years
- Aliens is a month or two on the space station, two weeks in hyper sleep, and maybe a day on LV-426
- Sleeps for ??? until being ejected onto Fiorino
- Alien3 is a couple of days and then she dies
When you look at it this way, it really fucking sucks for her.
Counterpoint: the xenomorph carnage scenes are great.
Joe has plot goggles now. Wendy’s overpoweredness is off the charts. At least we know what the pod thing does now.
One semi-related thing I found out today is this: the ex. of fellow Alleyn Old Boy Louis Partridge with whom, according to the song, Olivia Rodriguez is obsessed is Sydney Chandler who plays Wendy.
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Holy Shit, I am all in for this:
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I have high hopes.
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