REVISITING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There are two names connected to MOCKINGBIRD. For me, the author is always going to be Nelle. Perhaps mistakenly, whenever I heard mention of her, I had the impression people called her that. It rhymes with bell, and not belly. Her creation is always going to be Scout Finch. Not Jean Louise.
   I write here of Harper Lee out of politeness to Clarity, who is always listening in. Nelle is buried in Monroeville, Alabama. You can take an internet tour of the gravesite, where you’ll see other members of the Lee family there…with Finch in the name.
   Before I revisited Harper Lee’s book, I thought about how I visited it in the first place. Going back, there was the movie. Then I went in search of the book. For those of you who try that sort of thing, do your best to remember the book is the book and the movie is the movie.
   Maybe you encounter those items the other way around. Someone makes a movie, and then it is turned into a book. In that case, do your best to remember the movie is the movie and the book is the book. Or the movie of the book of the T-shirt of the radio show of the hamburger, and so on.
   (That should be the book of the movie of the breakfast cereal. Pardon me.)
   I went looking for the book after seeing the movie adaptation. It’s possible that a documentary prompted me into action. A documentary in which she was referred to as Nelle. As for the film, Harper Lee kept an eye on the movie production long enough to know they weren’t going to mess it up. She did her best not to mess the book up herself. For, first, there was another version of her story. A messed-up execution of one we never needed to see.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book from the start of the 1960s, which is to say there’s a bit of a hangover from the 1950s to deal with in reading it. But the setting is very strictly glued to that of Harper Lee’s childhood in the 1930s. By the time the book ends, historically we’re hovering on the edge of the Dustbowl Years and vivid imagery of the Migrant Mother photographed by Dorothea Lange. W. H. Auden puts a bullet to the 1930s in September 1939, in giving his label to a low dishonest decade…
   But that’s all later. We start around 1933. The outside world, fixed in the grand arena of history, seems so very far away from small-town America and its quota of daily small-town Americanisms depicted in the book. (Although, eventually, Hitler does get a mention.) At its core, MOCKINGBIRD concerns racial injustice sieved through the strained community built around it. This is the only way Lee can approach the story.
   It isn’t.
   There was another version. GO SET A WATCHMAN shows how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD started life. In that earlier manuscript, the character of Scout is grown to adulthood and, as Jean Louise, returns from the big city to view the old home town under a different light. The author is not particularly kind to her people, there. Lee was asked to work on the tale. She transformed a raw idea into a cooked meal by making the story all about Scout’s childhood days.
   Scout is young in both stories. In the rough prototype novel, she’s 26. And in the finished work, she starts the tale at the age of six. The homecoming story of a twenty-something character doesn’t sound as engaging as the tale of the child in the town surrounded by haunting figures.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a ghost story, with plenty of fake ghosts in it. Nothing in the vaguely supernatural background of the book is scary. The scary stuff is left to all those violent adult themes the child struggles to deal with in the foreground. For this is the Deep South in the 1930s; if a black man kisses a white woman, the town’ll hang him as soon as look at him.
   I’ve read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but I refuse to read GO SET A WATCHMAN. Sometimes, publication history is a bitch and stands in the way. I refer to the exploitation of a dead author’s unpublished works as necrophilia.
   “By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist’s work beyond that artist’s lifetime.”
   In this case, the author remained alive when the deal was struck. So this didn’t come across as necrophilia. No bonus points for that. Sharks tasted blood and circled in the water, under a sky packed with vultures biding their time while the hangman sharpened his axe…which he loaded up with buckshot. Or something like that. Unfortunate exploitation of the artist’s work during the artist’s dying days is no less a crime against art.
   Nelle…
   …your honour, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was absolutely of sound body and mind when she gave permission for her prototype manuscript to be published. On the other hand, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was subjected to what can only be described as elder abuse, not even comprehending the rights she granted shortly after her sister’s death and not too long before her own.
   Why mention her sister?
   If you do take an electronic tour of Harper Lee’s grave then you’ll see the name Finch there, just as I said. One of those grave markers notes that Alice Finch Lee was born in 1911 and died in 2014. She’s Nelle’s sister. And, into extreme old age, Alice looked out for Nelle’s interests.
   The chronology runs as follows: Alice dies in 2014, the book comes out in 2015, and Nelle dies in 2016. Alice hadn’t been the guardian of the legacy for the last three years of her life, retiring at the tender age of 100. Nelle’s manuscript existed the whole time, and she never published it. Conspiracy? The weight of time, reputation, and lack of literary output?
   Suppose you do rob a grave. Have the politeness to let the body climb down in there, first.
   You and I were not in the room with the writer and the lawyer, so whether cinder-crusted devilry or tedious publishing talk went on…we’ll never know. It’s much easier to look askance at the publisher for conduct unbecoming. That, we’ll return to.
   I tried as hard as I could. But it is impossible to write of one author without writing of the other. I’ll take a detour into the life and times of Truman Capote, the scamp. Nelle and Truman knew each other as children. He created a tomboyish character based on her in his book, and she created a social oddity of a friend based on him way over in her book.
   Did Truman Capote secretly write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or is that hogwash? I tell ye plain, ’tis hogwash. For the last fucking time, no, Branwell Brontë did not write WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Nelle, with MOCKINGBIRD nesting at the publisher’s, travelled with Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas.
   Multiple murder in Kansas interested Truman, and he wanted to write about that. He decided to visit the scene of the crime: to descend upon it. Despite the jaundiced babbling of Gore Vidal, delivering a scabrous view in the opposite direction, Truman Capote had talent. He didn’t use it wisely or well, but he had something before the booze rented him out and threw him to the bayleaf mob of critics. Baying is hardly the word for poseurs.
   The thought of Truman using Harper Lee as a condom to communicate with the local yokels…yes, that would’ve amused Truman. Capote is Italian slang for condom. I sense he knew. Nelle took Monroeville Alabama and turned it into Maycomb. The book was behind her, but only just. Truman lingered there, as the odd little boy. Now she was in Truman’s company, and he was still at heart an odd little boy. Nelle stood on the ground in another place with comb at the end of the name.
   Holcomb. There she assisted Truman in the early construction of IN COLD BLOOD. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lay far behind Truman. He’d dedicated it to his close friend Jack Dunphy. Years in the making, IN COLD BLOOD would be dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in that order.
   Capote once acknowledged her contribution and then scratched it out. He had trouble acknowledging her help. “Friend.” Yes. What else? “Assistant.” Capote, in hindsight, diminishing Lee’s contribution, knew how to publicise Capote. Nelle was there for the first two months. Did Branwell Brontë write WUTHERING HEIGHTS? No. Did Truman Capote write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? No. Did Nelle Lee write IN COLD BLOOD?
   There, things get tricky. No, she did not write the book. But did she make the writing of the book possible? Did she pave the way? Nelle broke the ice, right? Let’s be fucking clear, here. Nelle Lee dynamited the ice so that Truman Capote could have his book and eat it like cake he’d said he made all by himself. From recipe to reception.
   A new type of book. (It wasn’t.)
   Every word of it true. (A lie.)
   George Washington slept here. (He didn’t. But we might as well throw that one in, too.)
   Truman didn’t care about the multiple murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Since time out of mind, murder most foul has fascinated us. So he knew he could write about a morbidly evergreen subject. That had staying power. Truman didn’t care whether or not the murders would be solved.
   He and Nelle arrived in town in time for the funerals of the murdered family. Truman made a lot of friends there, in Kansas. That’s according to Truman. Nelle made those connections on his behalf. She became the long spoon the community relied upon to sup with Truman Capote.
   You can read his fiction in depth. But you’d never want to be in a room with him for anything beyond the span of a breakfast, Tiffany’s included or otherwise. He’d entertain you, and then you’d be a chapter in a book.
   Gore Vidal? Someone should gore Vidal. Fuck you, Gore Vidal. And for that, you’d have to buy me dinner first. I was childhood friends with Harper Lee. You couldn’t be featured in her book, not even as Boo Radley. But I’m in there. Not as Boo Radley, though. Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal. Go back to assaulting Norman Mailer’s fists with your plastic chin, you… (F-slur redacted.)
   I made that last paragraph up. But for someone writing A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, Truman made things up, too. True account. Not exactly. Multiple Murder. Now that bit he got right. Consequences? From a writer who didn’t care. A writer who came to care about all the wrong things, in the end, concerning that case.
   Nelle: Truman’s cultural guide, secretary, catch-all assistant, note-taker, editor, and friend, making it possible for people to relate to her as the acceptable face of Truman Capote’s investigation.
   Truman continued without Nelle’s assistance for years after, as the case led to suspects, arrests, trial, convictions, and executions. Capote didn’t care about the justice of it. The Clutter family, parents and children, were murdered by two men Capote took more interest in.
   Capote wanted to be the invisible narrator of his big book on big themes in an isolated place. But with Truman it’s all about him, all the time, every single time. That’s why here, I’ve only mentioned the murdered family once by name. I want you to know that the star of the show is Truman Capote…first and foremost, and that’s according to him. Not me. The murdered family is sidelined in favour of contact with the criminals.
   I’ve barely scratched the flawed mirror surface of Truman Capote’s life. It hides an ocean of depth, full of nasty vindictive things. My trident has three points to it. One. Truman knew Nelle in childhood, and served as a model for an oddball character in MOCKINGBIRD. Two. Nelle went with Truman to research the book that would become IN COLD BLOOD. She didn’t have MOCKINGBIRD attached to her name, just then. He was known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three…
   Wait. Detour. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote wrote that and lived off the back of it. (He’d dine out far and wide on all of his books, save at the very end, beyond his death. Stick a pin in that one.) The Breakfast movie appeared a year before the movie adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. Both writers made it big, and made it big at the movies.
   Truman danced with Marilyn Monroe. But she’d not be his character, Holly Golightly. Marilyn was warned off playing a prostitute, and that was that. They should have married, just to give us a disaster-zone as a cautionary tale. But, with Truman, that would be just one more disaster-zone/Tuesday. Let us not dwell on imagined wedlock.
   Capote hated the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the part of Holly. She was too pure, in his mind. No depths of darkness or suffering or want.
   If you know anything of Audrey’s life in the Second World War, you’d know she had more than her share of trouble to help inform playing a character in a movie, thank you very much.
   Capote, at his bitchiest, in resenting someone for not being tough…and simply not knowing or failing to acknowledge what Audrey went through…is about average for the man. Acknowledging others is, for people like Truman, simply a bend in the road that curves round, inevitably, back to people like Truman casting light on themselves.
   Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman was not a fan of the adaptation. He’d bend over backwards to point out that Holly Golightly wasn’t really a call girl. She’s not a prostitute at all. Then he goes and says the thing. Girls like that are American geishas. This comment is deeply offensive to the geisha specifically and to Japan in general. Shocking. That would be like casting Mickey Rooney to play a comedy relief Japanese character in Breakfast at…oh.
   Isn’t Mickey Rooney racist in that movie? TRUMAN: Hold my beer. Let me tell you about Holly Golightly and Japanese culture…
   Truman had issues with his movie adaptation. Nelle had no problems with hers. Truman’s book didn’t win a Pulitzer. Nelle’s did. Book and movie combined to make Nell an unlikely star. She shied from that, quite quickly, leaving her sister Alice to handle the messy business of publicity. Or…lack of publicity.
   There’s no such thing as a reclusive author. But there is such a thing as the author who fucks off into a room with a writing machine to do the work alone. To fill the blank page. That writing machine could be as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a manual typewriter; electronic keyboards are idiot-proof, and, therefore, less fussy.
   Nelle didn’t consider success. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death…at the hands of the reviewers. She was spared that. Truman, for his part, entered into gladiatorial combat with them. Both authors reduced their output. Truman envied Nelle’s success. A pointless envy, as she cared not for it. And so, that friendship ended.
   You’ll find them together as Scout and Dill, in MOCKINGBIRD. Truman Capote, at his most amusing, fictionalised by his childhood friend. And Nelle. If I call her a rebel, that has Southern connotations. Should you hunt for criticism of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it lies in a view that the author looked a little too kindly on her people of the South and let them off the hook. The counter to that is…just plain folks…come across as far more evil in their racism on account of being depicted as just plain folks. To depict their humanity is to reveal their inhumanity.
   Nelle and Truman tasted success. Truman developed an addiction to the fame. Nelle had an allergic reaction to it. Point three of my trident. After big success, MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, that was pretty much the end for both of them. They also faced this problem of a book resurfacing with grim finality. Nelle still had the manuscript of the prototype novel somewhere. Truman thought he’d destroyed his early book.
   The story goes that he left it behind in a place that was taken up by someone else. A magpie of a tenant, who discovered a Truman manuscript, and preserved it. Are some things worth preserving? I was once told a tale that I reworked into the opening of a novel…
   This is the book I shredded. And I destroyed the physical hard drive and all back-up media, too. But I kept the opening. The only good part was the part I’d been told by someone else. This was a singular lesson in learning to write. And in learning how to vapourise anything you didn’t want to see the light of day.
   After their deaths, the two were united by this connection – material resurfacing from the folds of the swamp. Nelle left some short stories in a place in New York. Truman had an early work bob to the surface. Writers were dead and gone, and books still hit the shops. SUMMER CROSSING. You know. Necrophilia.
   In Nelle’s case, THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER collects a bunch of short pieces. Why are there so many “lost” manuscripts to this history? If she’d wanted to, Nelle could have gone back in and worked up a few short stories to keep the literary beggars away. The hungry crowd of critics, I mean. Nelle gave us one book. Be happy in that.
   Scout Finch is a fictionalised version of Nelle. There are books out there with memorable characters. Some of those characters are memorable through description, action, or speech. The truly memorable characters from classic tales are memorable through all three of those things and one more item: they stay with you.
   Knowing how the friendship frazzled – an inevitability, with Truman – I prefer Scout and Dill to remain where they are, staying with memory. Not for me the publishing problem connected to the later-earlier work GO SET A WATCHMAN. Haven’t read it. Won’t read it. Did enough research on it to make comments here, and that’s that.
   It is an earlier work: the prototype. And it is the later work, published in the last days of Nelle’s life. Touted as a sequel, on the basis that it is about Scout returning to town those many years later, it fired enthusiasm in a great crowd to hear of its existence. Except…there are text passages word by revealing word that are practically the same scenes as they are in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Bit of editing, here, there, marking differences in MOCKINGBIRD. Don’t even pretend for a second that this other book is a sequel. It is not.
   Conduct unbecoming of a publisher includes trying to pass this prototype off as the direct sequel. I will grant you we finally discover something the realm of criticism toyed with, as an absent-minded dog toys with a bone. In the prototype book, the heroic Atticus Finch, Scout’s noble lawyer dad, is anything but. He’s a segregationist: the type to build separate drinking fountains based on skin-colour.
   In the prototype, Nelle is not so kind to her people of the South and she doesn’t let them off the hook. The two books could be resolved with expansion and editing of the prototype to turn that work into a true sequel. But this was not to be. Nelle died. She outlived Truman. He’d outlived his friendship with her. Could he have written more, with his heart, brain, and liver shot through like Swiss cheese from the wild excess of too much wild excess? With those wearying disadvantages, writing soon drops off into typing. And sloppy typing, at that.
   Could Nell have written more? She took a stab at true crime, covering a story that sent her into the writing landscape of IN COLD BLOOD. Familiar territory, for she’d walked that road and gathered many notes on the trail once before. But it was not to be, second time around.
   There’s a wanton, libertine, neediness in the literary critic/pundit who cries why couldn’t you give us more than one perfect book, you bastards to all the writers who only have one perfect book in them. Those poseurs are never fucking happy. You can shit gold for literary types like that, and they’d complain the shit wasn’t diamond-encrusted. Be wanting jam on it, next.
   If you enjoy a book, what more is there to say. We could wax lyrical about what might have been. But we can never truly know. Was Nelle thrown from her horse after riding her first book back to the stable of publication? If you write of the complacent daughter returning to the small town only to discover her lawyer father had feet of smashed and tainted clay…
   And the editorial view is…we can’t go with this book…what, then? Be softer in telling your tale. Focus on the childhood character. So you go away for a time and rewrite the damned thing. Now it’s an Instant Timeless Classic™, and you are set for literary life.
   Except. It must rankle that your initial idea, which is not so soft on your people of the South, it must hurt, that the core story was rejected in favour of your classic. What could you do, then? Take the prototype and rework it so that Scout grows up into Jean Louise Finch, and when she heads home from the Big City, obviously, we see she had a young daughter’s infallible view of the noble lawyer…only to realise this idolatry doesn’t match the man’s constant juggling of life in the Deep South…
   You’d need to gut both narratives to make it work. But once the classic is a classic, you can’t go back and change a single word of the sacred text. So the challenge then would be to rework and rework and rework the prototype until it no longer resembles much of anything.
   Some characters never grow up. And they really shouldn’t. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Even Huck Finn. The Secret Garden is set around the year 1907/08, and features a character – the boy Colin – who cannot walk. Spoiler: he regains the ability. And the children in that story never grow up. They mustn’t. For Colin is ten years old and infirm. The moment he walks again, well, that’s the moment he’s fit enough to serve in the trenches of the Great War.
   Holden Caulfield never grows up. People don’t like it when I say…you know he goes back to the school and shoots everyone at the end, right? Anyone forced to read Salinger’s fuck-awful book in school soon reaches that conclusion. So it isn’t in the text, so what?
   Scout and her brother Jem, even oddball Dill, never grow up. Spoiler: Jem never grows up in the prototype book. There’s plenty of forensic analysis online to show you the word-for-word scenes that are the same or nearly. MOCKINGBIRD has a layer of polish to the work. The other, no.
   I have detoured into talk of a monster: Truman Capote. And I am not the first to express distaste for the promotion of a prototype novel as a sequel to itself. No more of that. What brought me here?
   Revisiting Nelle’s tale.
   I’ll have to revisit the film. For that sort of story, seen through a child’s eyes, you always hope, desperately, when sitting down to watch…please tell me they employed children who could ACT. I’ve revisited the book in another way…and I haven’t written of that at all. How remiss.
   Now remember, if you are going to tackle such things, the book is the book and the movie is the movie and never the twain shall meet. But somewhere between 1960 novel and 1962 movie there’s a place for a visual adaptation that moves at your own pace: the pace at which you turn the comic book pages. In 2018, Fred Fordham adapted TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD into a graphic novel.
   Take a digital tour of Monroeville and stop by the old court house. Fred certainly went there, for the trial scenes. I now have two copies of this story. One a novel, and the other a comic book. Both start off with motifs of a fence. By design, if you know the tale. The novel is a towering work. And the hardback comic book does its damnedest to convey the same story.
   For reasons of compression, the movie gives you a taste of the novel if not the full range of flavours. Otherwise the movie would be a decompressed TV show. The same compression gives you a taste of the novel in the graphic novel. Otherwise the comic book would be a whole volume longer.
   I recommend all three adaptations. The movie may stay with you, as might the art in the graphic novel. But the book is the one that goes into the most detail and lingers, positively, the longest. My copy of the book carries an introduction by Albert French, whose own novels are not kind to the oppressor.

 

COLONEL SUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I stared at a story from yesteryear. COLONEL SUN: putting James Bond through his paces after his battle against a man who owned a golden gun. But I also looked at my own short story in that area. I can only call it James Bond Tourism. That’s as kind as I’ll be to my past self. Throw Bond into a familiar setting, drop in references to past misadventures, and wrap it up in a pastry of heat and violence.
   Having had a crack at that sort of nonsense myself, I’m in a position to say that Ian Fleming’s style is easy to observe yet hard to pin down on the page when typing in the manner of that far-off country of the past. The precise detail involving food, drink, places, and vehicles. That ability of Fleming’s to want to write fiction by dressing it in real clothes…is taxing.
   If you desire to invent guns, cars, and meals, why, turn to science fiction and be done with it. Have your hero drive a 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. He should be a detective named Marlowe, in a space zoot suit, with a goldfish bowl for a helmet. Google is his friend. Or digital assistant. Something along those lines.
   Fleming and Chandler wrote about worlds containing real guns. Yes, movies featuring James Bond are full of product placement. This is true of Fleming’s books. He packs the stories with guns, cars, food, and drink. All real. Why invent, when the genuine article adds a layer of reality to an otherwise fanciful tale? Bed the fiction in a garden of real items, and make your outlandish saga somehow more reasonable.
   Writing like Fleming is, indeed, taxing. And that’s for reasons of product placement, alone. James Bond’s taste at breakfast is not Bond’s. Strictly speaking, it isn’t exactly Ian Fleming’s. No. The devil in the detail at breakfast comes from Fleming’s friend William Plomer.
   This set me wondering. Fleming surrounded himself with people who were contacts when it came to story details. Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his book about Commander James Bond? Let’s have a bit of clarity. Novel.
   Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his James Bond novel? For Amis had already tackled Bond to the ground in an ungentlemanly game of rugby elsewhere. Amis drew on Ian Fleming’s books and also Fleming’s knowledge when it came to compiling a dossier on James Bond.
   Not a novel. A book. And he met Fleming, who was near the end of his life, just to cover details in the dossier. Fleming pointed out a few slips. The Bond author was used to those, having taken both barrels from the acid wit of Noël Coward.
…what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England. This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue.
   Fleming had the same brand of acid flowing through his veins, when it came to Noël Coward.
   It’s interesting. When you sweat with embarrassment the sweat runs down your face and drops off your first chin on to your second.
   Amis analysed Bond from the stance of a fannish reader who knew the dossier assignment called for a bit more work than just liking the fiction and regurgitating facts. His own level of criticism may have had Amis shaking in his socks moments before meeting Fleming. But the Bond author didn’t gut the new boy.
   And Amis was the new boy. Soon enough, he, too, would be a Bond author. When Fleming died, leaving The Man with the Golden Gun short of the revision and polish required to bring it up to ramming speed, Amis was offered a crack at it.
   History differs as to what happened next. Amis made recommendations, but they weren’t carried out. Alternatively, Amis made changes uncredited. He rewrote the book. Or he wrote the book. What do we know about any of this wilderness of mirrors?
   Fleming wrote the book. He complained about it to his editor, William Plomer. There were plans to finish the job. But Fleming’s time was marked, and his heart gave out. Amis was asked to look at the manuscript. Money changed hands. He was hired on as a consultant.
   Yes, he made recommendations. Fleming’s fingerprints are all over an actual manuscript. Amis provided a page of notes. You only review twice, Mr Amis. Once when you read the manuscript in private, and once when you publish a bitchy review that questions why some of your own ideas weren’t taken up throughout the story.
   For that is what Amis does in his published review. He asks why Fleming didn’t exploit this point or that part of the plot. Then he offers his own alternative motive for the absurdity of the assassin Scaramanga taking James Bond on as a partner in crime. Scaramanga fancied him something rotten.
   Not according to William Plomer, who’d been closely involved with the book. At the end of his life, Fleming struggled to complete the story. Complete it he did. But not to the level of detail Fleming demanded of himself.
   Amis decried the thinness of the book’s plot. We’ll return to that when I stick a knife in the back of Colonel Sun. And so, to Colonel Sun. It’s easy to mock by calling the book…
   The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim Bond.
   Take a (Bond) Girl Like You.
   The Old (Foreign) Devils.
   Amis has a bit of a fixation with setting Bond up as a hero in the Byronic fashion. Whatever the fuck that is. It’s just Amis being Amis. Or Markham, which was his cover for the Bond assignment. A cover Amis immediately blew.
   Why is Kingsley Amis, of all people, writing a special introduction to this guy Markham’s book? Although Kingsley’s name is shorter on the cover, his name appears in larger type. What’s that about? Some kind of fix was in.
   Ann Fleming, Ian’s widow and keeper of the sacred flame, hated Bond. But she managed to love Ian Fleming, no easy task, and hated Kingsley Amis even more than she detested her husband’s violent creation.
   She didn’t want this slipshod fair-weather commie writing the further adventures of a character she couldn’t stand. Never one to let her snobbishness get in the way of her snobbishness, Ann joined a long list of people who had nothing good to say of Kingsley Amis.
   How did Amis do, in the Bond stakes? Well enough that his work filtered down into the movies. The World is Not Enough borrows the central point of Colonel Sun: M is kidnapped.
   Die Another Day doesn’t have Colonel Sun in it, but there’s a Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. Just far enough from the character Amis gave us to avoid having to pay out cash for the use. However, the movie is a camouflaged version of Moonraker and has little to do with Amis, beyond half-pinching a character name.
   Spectre, though, puts Amis deep in the closing credits for dialogue that appears in Colonel Sun. This is a torture scene. Congratulations. Amis made it into the worst Bond movie. Spectre is, in my view, fucking lamentable. That’s a highly technical term. Film has its moments, but moments don’t lead to a satisfying cinema-going experience.
   They’d done a deal. Spectre was back on the menu, after the legal dust settled – for the last time. Kevin McClory’s long-running dispute over ownership of various story elements died with him. After that, it was much easier to settle on a deal.
   Okay. Resurrect Spectre. And the boss, Blofeld. But make it meaningful. How? Oh, show flashbacks to other Bond characters in the opening credits. That’s where the welding starts. Taking the Daniel Craig movies and fusing them into one long integrated storyline that shows…Spectre was behind everything, all along.
   No. It does not work. Thanks for asking. The movie is the story of two boys who know each other. One grows up to be James Bond. And the other…what, creates Spectre just to get back at Bond? Er…
   Where the fuck was I? Amis successfully wrote and delivered his one Bond novel. The opening is good. There are vivid scenes. His one failing is the plot, which is practically non-existent. Think it over for two seconds, and it falls apart. Why is the villain doing this? For all his talk of trying something new, by going into a Greek setting, Amis rehashes Doctor No as a far less interesting Colonel Sun.
   A fleet of books followed, guided by other hands. Had Amis lived to see his credit in Spectre, well, first, he’d have been a hell of a fucking age. Second, he’d have derided much of the movie. You can see his ears perking up at the dialogue in the torture sequence. Numbers flash over his eyes as he calculates whether any payment for usage felt worthwhile.
   Amis wrote Bond for the money. Fleming wrote Bond to create excitement as he typed page to page, staving off boredom. Ian Fleming, thrilled at the thought of creating a scene in a story. That stays with me, long after Amis typing for cash saw his Colonel disappear at the first sunset.

 

STUPID SEXY SEA DEVILS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. Yes, it’s a fucking shit title for a Doctor Who spin-off. No two ways about that. I prefer the title STUPID SEXY SEA DEVILS. At least, then, the audience has an idea what to expect. The problem with the war of the title is…a complete lack of war in the show.
   One character even tells us there wasn’t really a war. What do we get, instead? We get THE NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. Not as catchy, true, but you’d certainly grasp the idea from the title. I didn’t hate this spin-off. Just the really stupid bits of this spin-off.
   Yes, we were handed a DOCTOR WHO BINGO opportunity from the start. Don’t knock back a vodka shot every single time a member of U.N.I.T. bites the dust. You’ll lose your liver. Cross off a box at the mention of the main character, from the main show, who won’t be putting in a cameo here.
   Scribble heartily over the NO TARDIS box. And cross off a box every single time the last of the Disney Money™ is splashed up on the small screen for no real reason. This show ran for five episodes. Four episodes, if you skip the padding. It takes a long time to descend to the depths. We really didn’t need to share that journey.
   THE WAR BETWEEN THE DISNEY CORPORATION AND THE BBC was quite a half-show. For every scene I enjoyed, inevitably, there lumbered into view a scene I wanted to axe. And so it went, episode by episode, until the end. Will there be a sea-quel? No, thank fuck.
   Where to begin? With THE SEA DEVILS. This was a story starring Jon Pertwee. Sea Devils live in the sea. Is that true? No. They hibernate. Waiting to be told it is safe to emerge. The catastrophe that forced them to bunker down, well, that never happened. And the wake-up call never happened, either.
   We get some shenanigans with the Doctor’s Time Lord foe, the Master. He’s running a criminal enterprise from inside a prison. Boo, hiss. The short version…we’ll return to the short version shortly…the Master is in league with the Sea Devils, planning to revive loads of them as his aquatic army of doom. He’s only missing a volcano base and a white cat to complete his mission.
   Revived Sea Devils don’t like what the beastly humans are doing. So the devilish creatures start menacing tubs, boats, and ships. Then they lurch ashore and get up to no good. And yet, they have a point. I suspect only the meanest ones relish being called Sea Devils.
   A catastrophe threatened to destroy the Sea Devils, before humans even evolved. The Sea Devils took a nap. When they woke, they found we’d come along and fucked shit up. We wrecked the planet. Yes, DOCTOR WHO told eco-stories back in the day. This is not a new thing.
   That story was, itself, a rehash of an earlier tale. Just with water creatures thrown in, instead of land-based ones. And so, the Sea Devils were established. Defeated, they disappeared from the show. A one-off threat. Until they returned in WARRIORS OF THE DEEP. That’s the one with the underwater base and all those bright lights that make the monsters so mysterious and scary…
   Oh, wait. No. Somehow that bright lighting doesn’t work for the production of this story. The shambling liability is the pantomime seahorse caught in bright lights. An unfinished costume gave the poor operators the sense that they’d been huffing all the glue. And after you watch Ingrid Pitt’s martial arts display against the pantomime seahorse, you’ll wish you’d huffed all the glue yourself.
   That was the last we saw of the Sea Devils. Until relatively recently, when LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS reared its rubbery head. Luckily, no one ever saw this travesty. The Sea Devils of Penzance LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS had all the non-viewers non-scratching their non-existent heads in sheer befuddlement. I haven’t seen that story, and neither have you. Got it. Right? Terrific. Just pretend we haven’t seen that one. I certainly don’t know what you are talking about. Piratical Sea Devil nonsense.
   Let’s leave all those Sea Devil stories to the side…except for one. The first one. In anticipation of the release of this Disney spin-off, the BBC went back to the first story with a diver’s knife and gutted the running-time like a fish. Ah, the short version. There was also some editing and fucking around with the audio, so that a Sea Devil could retro its way through a line about the war between the land and the sea.
   Dialogue that never existed in the original. Just to plug the up-and-coming Disney collab, you understand. Even if no one understands. What do I think of that alteration? It was a load of bollocks. Shouldn’t have been tampered with. It was, though. And I can’t do anything about that except gripe. Or reach for my unaltered physical media. I recommend that second option. That way, you get to see the pilot episode, An Unearthly Child – currently unavailable on the BBC.
   By sheer coincidence, I am writing about this fishy tale while listening to Polly Harvey working her way through Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. It’s preferable to watching Stupid Sexy Sea Devils again. And so, to the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils with their stupid sexy non-war…
   Five episodes seems a bit awkward for a spin-off. It feels contractually obliged and, therefore, contractually contrived. We are treated to loads of shots involving the last of the Disney cash. The Sea Devils are back, folks, and they’re about as menacing as nothing in particular. There. I put the damning view in print.
   What’s the plot? A Sea Devil is caught in a fishing net and. Oops. The Sea Devil is killed, and placed on display to make money out of internet clicks. Once upon a time, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce would’ve gotten involved. Then the United Nations objected to being dragged into fiction on the BBC. So it’s been the Unified Intelligence Taskforce ever since.
   U.N.I.T. gets involved. And so does…
   For the next bit we must visit the cinema of 1950-something. There’s a bloke in U.N.I.T. who arranges the taxis. And he is accidentally assigned to a Top Secret mission, investigating Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. Sounds like a job for Sir Norman Wisdom. Deep in the heart of the 1950s, we have this accident-prone bloke, an underdog, who, with a bit of cinematic slapstick and a heart of gold, keeps informing Mr Grimsdale that there’s a spot of bother. Only it is far more complicated than that. And…
   I’m not saying the bloke who hires the taxis is based on Norman, from 1950-something. But it certainly fucking feels like it. A hapless bloke who stumbles into situations. He books the taxis. Sounds about right, for this show. Barclay Pierre-Dupont. Bit of a mouthful. I’ll just shorten that to Norman for the purposes of this text.
   So Norman ends up on Dragon Island. People who are fated to die here…die here. Remember. You don’t knock back any alcohol for those brave sacrifices. Norman shows a bit of respect to the corpse of the Sea Devil, and that gets him on the radar of…surely the sonar of…the Sea Devils. Those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. Turns out, they are very advanced for people who spent a long time slumbering under the sea.
   And these very clever Stupid Sexy Sea Devils want to arrange a peace, of sorts. There wasn’t a war. But we’ve been fucking with the planet’s ecology for ages, and the sanctimonious Sea Devils want to tell us what to do on our own land. Things like…stop chucking your rubbish in our sea, you barely-evolved apes.
   They do have a bit of a point there. Don’t overlook the subtext, though. Those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils went and put the sub in subtext. This spin-off show might feel like a diatribe against Thames Water. I suspect a hint of subtext went in that direction. Subtle. I’d list problems at Thames Water, but I want to keep the page-count down.
   This show about those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils may have it in for Thames Water. Anyway. Saving the planet is urgent. We must act now. Or else. So let’s speed this up a bit, shall we? Right. Except. For some reason, when the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils want to meet the Evil Bastard Humans, it’s important to, er, build a massive fucking concrete pipe coming up out of the Thames.
   Okay. This is a science fiction show, so we have to allow it on that outlandish basis. Otherwise, it would take fifteen years to obtain planning permission and another five years to build the pipe way over budget. With a few leaks at the opening ceremony. It would be a lot quicker for a few Sea Devils to rise eerily from the Thames and hop on a speedboat to take them to a conference room with a shower built in at one end.
   Also, despite the Disney money, this production still can’t do digital helicopters. I guess the Disney money didn’t stretch to hiring a real helicopter to fly along the river. My point is…the show gives you an effective scene. Sea Devils rising from the depths at Dragon Island. And then you have a bit of bollocks to…tide…you over until the next effective scene.
   As soon as you see the big pipe leading inside a building, and it opens on glass walls…you are waiting for the inevitable crack in the glass. It is built into the plot at that point. Spoiler: yes, it really is built into the plot at that point. So, after a construction montage, we are ready to save the world by negotiating with fish.
   The Stupid Sexy Sea Devils don’t like being called devilish. Even if they are from the sea. They might have been Sea Angels, but no. They are Homo Aqua. Queue the homo joke from Norman. I was waiting for conspiracist Alex Jones to do a cameo, warning us that Sea Devils turned the water gay.
   You might have missed the trailer campaign for this show. I’ll grant you that. It’s possible. The trailer campaign shows us…one of those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. And the tale is framed as a love story between a man and a fish. The main response to the trailer campaign was…
   Sea Devils are sexy? When did that happen?
   I guess it happened on the internet a long time ago, with fans writing fiction. The BBC took a while to catch up. See also Stupid Sexy Cybermen, Stupid Sexy Daleks, and Stupid Sexy TARDIS. Here’s the point. It was virtually impossible to avoid the news that Sea Devils were going to be sexy in this spin-off show.
   Maybe you missed the trailer campaign. If you watched the trailer, though, it made the arrival scene really fucking stupid. The Sea Devils are on the way up the pipe to talk to a bunch of very important people…and Norman. He’s involved now, somehow. The security threat posed by fragile glass walls and a shitload of water…ah, fuck it, that doesn’t matter.
   Everyone should be patched in via primitive video conferencing. Except…high-tech video, using the last of the Disney cash. The arrival scene plays out in a very coy fashion. Koi fashion? I hear they’re wearing fishnets in Paris this season. This blundering sequence hides what the trailers showed us. It’s the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil. She’s here to negotiate with the worst humanity can offer. So she rejects all that malarkey and wants to chat to the guy who books the taxis.
   We must talk about U.N.I.T. In the original show, the outfit was run by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. He would gladly order a Sea Devil shot as soon as look at one. You can just see it, can’t you? Chap with the gills, there. Five rounds rapid. In the revamped show, and in this spin-off, the outfit is run by his daughter Kate.
   Uncharitable viewers hold to the notion that Kate doesn’t get any character development. She’s meant to be a force of nature acting as a barrier against the Doctor’s plans, whatever those are. There’s no Doctor in the spin-off, so her conspiratorial organisation must act as a barrier against other conspiratorial organisations.
   She gets plenty of character development here. You may not like any of that character development. That’s a separate issue. We end episode one with the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil elevating the taxi guy to the position of ambassador in the peace negotiations. He goes all Norman Wisdom at that point. And, indeed, every point.
   In episode two we discover the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil has an untranslatable title. But we can call her Salt. Idly, I wondered if the next Sea Devils in the line-up were Vinegar, Fish, and Chips. But no. Salt has every reason to be salty. At the end of the first episode she delivered her dead children to the humans, blaming the humans for pollution, death, destruction, and the inability to create a cohesive TV show. For every scene that worked, there was an equal and opposite scene that failed.
   There’s local resistance to the idea of Norman Wisdom as humanity’s representative. That played out a little too long. Could have been cut back so we could get on with whatever the story was meant to be getting on with. Clearly, Salt is the only game in town, and she luuurves Norman. The internet casually wondered how he was going to fuck a fish. Not if.
   How, where, and when.
   Meanwhile, we have the world’s bastards putting together a biological weapon derived from samples taken from Salt’s dead babies. There’ll be a lot of obvious plotting kicking in, with the subtlety of a whale landing on your breakfast table. Plot must hove into view, sailing from the horizon to the point of not-so-sudden revelation.
   Norman is the spokesman. But he reads from a government script. Except…we know he’s going to deviate from that government script at every chance. Meanwhile, Kate escapes from conspiracies for a little rest. She goes home to her age-gap romance with doomed Hot U.N.I.T. Dude. Spoiler: that was no spoiler. In STAR TREK he’d be the new guy in the landing party on a hostile world. Here, he’s brave toast. Brave, certainly. But definitely also toast.
   Colonel Christofer Ibrahim is part of Kate’s character development. Luckily, Hot U.N.I.T. Dude gets a bit more character development himself. Unluckily, that develops into being doomed. I liked this part of the show, letting Kate and Christofer be human against a chaotic background, as it deflected from some of the large lumbering blundering scenes we were subjected to at regular intervals.
   Industry talks to government, and various military factions crawl out of the woodwork. There’s a plan to take down the amphibians before the amphibians have even gotten around to spelling out their unreasonable demands. U.N.I.T. could be a part of this conspiracy if Kate sides with the Prime Minister.
   Kate isn’t going to be evil at all at any point in this narrative. Right?
   Now to the unreasonable demands. Salt wants a glass of water. From the Thames. So…Salt wants Thames water. Not Thames Water, the true villain of this story. Or maybe Salt wants Thames Water. Salt doesn’t want water from the tap. Hell, Salt doesn’t want to drink the water. She wants to inflict Thames water on the humans. It’s subtle, this diatribe.
   Then we cut to one of these pointless fucking scenes. It takes a bunch of soldiers, with guns, to fetch the water from the river. Now…the pipe that leads to the conference room…that pipe emerges from the river Thames. So why not just dip into that? Too easy.
   All it takes is a mad scientist in a white coat to dip a glass in. No. We must do this whole thing with soldiers and guns and shit. It pads the show out. The scene serves as an example of the padding in this spin-off. Anyway, Norman Wisdom can’t drink water from the Thames. Humanity rejects Thames water, and Thames Water. Going by the subtext.
   Humanity has to clean up. Obligingly, humanity sets targets for this. But those aren’t good enough for the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. So it’s time for the war to begin. We get a lot of negotiating. I think if you pay a bunch of actors to be in a big room, you want to dwell on the location…even if the audience isn’t as keen.
   Time to end the negotiations. It’s war…against…litter. The Stupid Sexy Sea Devils have the technology to filter all the plastic waste out of the oceans and return it to land. I have many questions. For a start: if you are this powerful, why would you negotiate with the enemy? Just drop the litter on the land with no explanation. That would have been a great opening to the first episode.
   It’s not just plastic, though. Sunken ships. Many questions. We run through a barrage of TV news images. There’s not a Nigel Farage clone in the sequence, but…spoiler. Here he is, and that is no spoiler. After the global case of fly-tipping, it’s back to the negotiating chamber.
   We find out that littering is war. But the real war started long ago. It’s okay. There’ll be a peace plan. Pollution. Just say NO. Borders. The Sea Devils will control the sea. All of the sea. And they throw in a wild card here. The sky, too. Now they are Stupid Sexy Sky Devils. And they demand the hardest demand of all.
   But first, the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil does that thing the Incredible Hulk does. HULK ANGRY. NO ONE BEAT HULK WHEN HULK ANGRY. HULK SMASH PUNY SEA DEVIL. PUNY OCEAN NOT FIGHT BACK. HULK WAVE GOODBYE. When Salt grows angry, Salt grows saltier and turns into an angry guy. Now the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil is still a Stupid Sexy Sea Devil, but…the writing team threw away a chance to state that this change is caused by human pollution of the world’s oceans. Humans made the fish angry. Thames Water humans, specifically, I guess.
   Where’s Alex Jones when you need him? Spoiler: you will never need him. Could the frogs turn Alex Jones gay? No more than they could make him less irritating.
   Back to that final bleak demand. The demandiest of demands. Salt uses a pearl in the neck to alter TV screens. How the fuck is that done? This is waved away by a character who asks that question without swearing. On the screens of the world we see the location of the next meeting. The big demand is that the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils meet the human delegation…under the sea.
   There is Disney money tied up in this. Are we watching The Little Mermaid but in the DOCTOR WHO universe? And so to episode three. Padding. Now there’s an expedition to the bottom of the sea. These episodes are around 45 minutes. The first fifteen minutes? Devoted to putting a team together and getting ready for a very long slow underwater taxi sequence.
   We’re told the journey will take two hours and seventeen minutes. Spoiler. It feels longer. And that’s not counting the training montage. Spoiler. Norman Wisdom is on the team. Spoiler. When you ask someone on the team what is in the box, the answer is always A BOMB.
   Spoiler. That is not a spoiler. Obvious bomb is obvious. We need to know what the evil humans are doing in the meantime, so we cut to Downing Street where the Prime Minister is taking advice on all the different methods of solving the fish problem.
   Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is at the table as the voice of reason. Her Brigadier dad would have been taking advice from some rum chap in the Royal Navy on the guidance systems of the latest torpedoes. Evil Foreign Woman in Uniform voices an opinion. Slap her…she’s French. Evil Foreign Man in Uniform also has an opinion. He’s American, and we expect him to become more evil as we go along. His default setting is evil, and he’s working his way up to a higher level of purity. Then he’ll upgrade to Pure Evil+, with added menthol.
   This is about opposition. Kate could infiltrate the meeting and learn more. All she learns to do here is put a huge target on herself. That’s not a spoiler. Obvious conspiracy is obvious. We go back to the sphere that’s descending to the meeting, just as a reminder of how long it takes.
   Then we’re with the Prime Minister, at a private gathering minus Kate. The warmongering American tells us that this is definitely a war. And we should be getting our war on. Never mind that the bomb is already on its way. This part of the war is about removing obstacles and firing up the bioweapon that took half a minute to perfect from stolen samples.
   I haven’t talked about the music. When first shown, the spin-off was roundly condemned for throwing loud music over every snippet of speech. Is it that bad? No. However, there is value in promoting scenes with no music at all. Even for long stretches. Do we get that in this spin-off? We can dream.
   Even the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils realise the descent is soaking up too much of this padded episode. They take matters into their own fishy hands and…slightly speed things up. This causes needless panic. And more music. Wait a bit. The music does die away. But not for long.
   Finally, we are under the sea. And the area is made breathable for the humans. Everyone can take off those diving helmets. Except the guy with the bomb. He keeps his on, for some curious reason. Salt invites the delegation to talk, but first she manipulates the walls of this grotto so she can be alone with Norman Wisdom.
   They could unite, to end the litter war. Because she luuurves him. And he doesn’t know what to think. Luckily, the plot intrudes and the other doomed members of the team arrive. There’s a spooky gathering of Deep Ones Sea Devils out beyond Sea Devil Reef, and it’s all gone a bit H.P. Lovecraft H.P. Lovecraft.
   But that’s not important right now. We need to go back to London to see Kate avoid assassination. Sadly, her Doomed U.N.I.T. Boyfriend doesn’t make it. He bravely sacrifices himself to the magickiest magic bullet to kill a TV character since the last magic bullet that killed a TV character.
   I’m looking at you, Buffy show. Spoiler: that magic bullet was a load of fucking bullshit as well.
   Maybe he’ll make it. He doesn’t. Now we can return to the depths of this plot and the obvious bomb. Obvious bomb obviously explodes. Norman Wisdom is there to reduce the damage with a last-second save. Luckily for him, there’s no magic bullet to take him out.
   Although, the deliberate editing across two different scenes makes it look as though Norman Wisdom is going to push Kate Lethbridge-Stewart out of a second bullet’s path. I’d have turned up for that science fiction twist. The dreaded and padded episode three spent a long time building up to an obvious bomb and a hashtag sadface sacrifice.
   Oh well. On we go.
   Five episodes. Seems a bit short. On the other hand. Could have been done in four, without padding episode three. Kate survives the next bullet in episode four. A lot of Deep Ones Sea Devils die. Norman Wisdom and Salt make it out and up and away. She uses some sort of magic wizard shield ability to keep Norman Wisdom alive.
   I have questions. If she can move at mega-speed through the waves, why would Salt wait around for the humans to show up in the first place? A bunch of Stupid Sexy Sea Devils could ferry the humans down to the meeting super-fast. But no. She gives him the kiss of life all the way to the surface. Don’t know how long that takes. It is a scene that passes quickly. On the other hand, maybe it takes twenty minutes of kissing to reach safety. Who knows. Has she passed him the disease of being a fish-person? Is he cured of the disease of being human? That’s what we really want to understand.
   Then we endure the announcement. Why, those Sea Devils were devils all along. How do we know? Salt confesses on TV. But wait. It’s a…
   Deep.
   Fake.
   Fuck off. Just. No. Stop it. Really? Get lost. Leave TV land now and never show your face around here again. Fucking hell. Moving on from that. Salt becomes a Prisoner of War. The war that isn’t actually happening. In the first round of the war, one fishy dude died. Salt lost her children. And in the second round of the war, people were killed by plastic from the sea. Kate’s guy. Then the conspiracy killed five members of the Away Team. Is this a war? Are we simply not adding up off-screen deaths on both sides and pretending that’s a war?
   What’s really important? Does anything tie back to the Prime Minister. That’s what’s important. No. Nothing ties to him. Except all the tendrils of the conspiracy. So a rich businessman has to die next. Loose end. Let’s kill water company executives by making them drink their own contaminated water. Or you could send a killer on a bike to handle a doorstep assassination. That works.
   Norman Wisdom stages a jailbreak with Salt and they swim off along the Thames. Things pick up, as a new representative emerges from the stupid concrete pipe leading to the conference room. This Stupid Sexy Sea Devil is called Tide. I expected his henchman to be named Pods. Together they could pull a quick getaway in a CGI froth of soap bubbles. But no. It was not to be.
   Kate now represents humanity. She reads from a government script. Then she ditches the script. There are several sections of this spin-off show’s script that could have done with a dunking in the Thames. Tide brings up the name Aquakind. Could be a brand of washing-up liquid that’s soft on your skin.
   Salt committed a crime. She saved a human. So she must report in, for punishment. That punishment is incredibly important. Stick a harpoon in that. We’ll return to the point. What is going on in this scene? These are protracted negotiations about Salt. Wait. Are they referencing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks? I don’t think the script is sharp enough to throw that in there.
   Doesn’t matter. Tide reveals a new weapon. The ability to create instant rust. I have many questions. If you hate human debris on the ocean floor, and that debris is metal, you could have insta-rusted it down at any time. Why start with litter as a weapon when you could just go to the use of rust? Hell, why use rust, when you could…ah, but I am jumping ahead of the plot. Stick a double harpoon in this reference. We’ll come back here for the end.
   What kind of war is this? We’ve given you back all your rubbish. So we can’t threaten you with that again. We’ll threaten your metal. Including all the metal we dumped on your land. So many questions. We’re anti-pollution, but we’re going to generate a fuck-tonne of rust. Rusty metal flakes, blown out to sea. Or in the sea, if we raise the level of the sea. Taking all the litter back from London when London submerges. Er…
   Never mind all that. The conspiracy rattles on. That instant bioweapon has a target: Salt. Norman Wisdom and Salt hide out in an abandoned building. First thing you do? Smash windows, as glass is fucking strange to a fish. Did she just…smash the glass in the fish tank? Is that what this is?
   Stupid Sexy Sea Devil starts talking sexy and has to be told by Norman Wisdom to calm down the sexy talk. This is just in case he develops feelings for fish. We all have feelings for fish – mostly concerning cod in batter with plenty of salt and vinegar on the accompanying chips. Yum yum. Tasty. I guess, with a fish invasion, we shouldn’t go broadcasting that info.
   Taste itself comes up from the deep in this scene. Norman Wisdom has a pain in the neck. Is he now slowly growing gills, and transforming into a Stupid Sexy Sea Devil? That is not a spoiler. It lands with all the subtlety of a blue whale hitting your breakfast table.
   Time for a campfire romance. Wouldn’t she shrivel up next to a fire? Salt explains her punishment for helping a human. She’d have to swim alone. This is important to the plot. In ways I cannot fathom, the script dwells on this Little Mermaid theme. Salt was always going to find her way to Norman Wisdom.
   And then they kiss.
   After which, Salt admires his erection. No, really. I’m not making that bit up. We leave them to it while Kate wanders the night, contemplating loss. Back to the lovers. She realises he tastes of salt, and he can’t bring himself to say she tastes of fish. The conversation turns to Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. Stupid Sexy Sea Devil opinion is that Kate is a good soul.
   That isn’t going to fly. Kate’s character development, after the trauma, is to be a bad soul. Our runaways need a plan. And that plan is to escape to North Wales. We don’t get into the detail of that, as it is bollocks. There’s a vast conspiracy going on. But Norman Wisdom reasons, with a complete lack of wisdom, that if he can just contact his family then he could arrange transport.
   U.N.I.T. is listening in. And the Evil American Soldier is listening in to U.N.I.T. Meet you all on the bridge for tea and biscuits. It doesn’t go that well. Salt already explained that her people could find her if she went into the water. To be found is to be punished. Punished to swim the ocean alone.
   At the inevitable stand-off, good soul Kate decides there’ll be a whole lotta shootin’ going on if the American starts his shit. Salt dives off the bridge into a cliffhanger ending. This means her people must find her and exile her. But we have an episode to go. And somehow, we need to squeeze biological warfare into the mix.
   Let’s finish this. Time for really funny horror. Stupid Sexy Sea Devils emerge from the deep. They play seashell horns and summon dogs to the nets. And then they eat those dogs. More negotiating back in the conference room. Sea Devils can’t eat dogs. Don’t eat pets. Well, humans can’t eat fish. Don’t eat our relatives. But fish also eat fish, and that whole thing falls apart.
   And now we turn to that good soul, Kate. She’s under assessment, to see if she can continue in her job after the trauma of loss. No. She’s done. Here’s her character development. She kept tabs on her assessor. And if her assessor doesn’t play ball, Kate plays rough with other people’s lives. Keep her on the job and double the strength of the pills, or else.
   She keeps her job.
   Norman Wisdom is turning into a fish-man. Salt is gone. Kate’s lost the plot. But the biological conspiracy glides into port around now. So it’s time for the Sea Devils to…melt the ice. That should have been the opening gambit. Okay. That, or eating the dogs.
   If the Sea Devils raise the sea levels, what then? It’s the end. And that would be a bad thing for humans. Luckily, some evil bastards concocted a biological weapon of fish destruction. Yay! Humans for the win. Tide puts in an appearance to give the humans five years of melting ice before the end. Oh, and it was never a war. Then why put that in the title of this show?
   Back to the conspiracy. Norman Wisdom is kept secure, for scientific analysis. He cuts a deal with a guard to let him free for the night so he can race to the coast, shove his head in the sea, and yell…
   “Mr Grimsdale! The Sea Devils. Mr Grimsdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale!”
   Nothing. Salt does not answer the call. First. What the fuck is her hearing like if she can hear a shout under water from, potentially, half a world away? Second. There’s a reason for a lack of answer. The beastly French Baddie is blocking sonic signals or some bullshit. Frankly, at that point, I would only have cared if she’d offered viewers an éclair. Not other characters in the show. Viewers.
   The fix is in. Switch off the Sonic Sea Baffles for one night and let Norman Wisdom put a call through to his aquatic girlfriend. But before we even get into that, Norman passes out on the bed and he has the bioweapon planted in him. The next time he races off in the night, he’s a walking bomb. There’s a handy limit on the weapon. It isn’t 100% perfect. Norman is turning into a fish-man, so he could be killed by the weapon. Never mind all that nonsense.
   On the beach he reunites with his lost love. She can save the day. There’s a last-gasp fragment of knowledge. She pretty much tells Norman Wisdom to ask for parley, in the piratical sense, and the Sea Devils will be forced to listen. It’s a chance. A glint of hope. But he’s love-bombing her. One passionate kiss and it’s Ebola: for Sea Devils. Seabola.
   Remember sticking a harpoon in that idea of punishment. Salt is forced to swim alone. In exile. Well how the fuck does she contaminate her entire species, then? Do they all share the same bathwater at a very crowded inlet? How virulent is this bio-explosion? The job is done. Both sides meet on the beach. And both sides pass something across the divide.
   The magic word, accord, will never reach the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. For they be deaded. Or…90% of them, anyway. Hooray. The monsters are no threat. And the bad guys won. We are, sadly, treated to a fantasy sequence which involves the Prime Minister in a shower. Could have done without that. Though the fantasy moment with the conniving French and American villains trapped inside a flooded car…that’s more effective.
   Finally, inevitably, the glass walls crack. The negotiating chamber floods. What a shock. All that’s left is for humanity to pick up the pieces. Salt and Norman Wisdom swim off together when he realises he’s turning into a fish-man. Two harpoons to end on, remember? Why use rust, when you can…
   If Salt has the ability to transform Norman Wisdom into a fish-man, then why start a very public war at all? Why litter? Stupid Sexy Sea Devils rise from the waves at night, and call out with their siren shells. They lure fishermen into the depths, and make Sea Devils out of them. That would have been far more atmospheric, and conspiratorial.
   Why hunt our dogs? Are cats too hard to hunt? Fish hunting cats would have been funnier. So why would you dump litter, or make things rust, when you can convert all the humans into fish-people? Why litter? Hmmm…
   Litter. The point we end on is a scene featuring Kate on the beach. A man drops litter. She tells him to pick it up. He refuses. She pulls a gun on him and tells him to pick it up. The only way we, as a species, will be truly ecological, is if someone holds a gun to our heads, it seems.
   That’s not the point to end on. The real point is, after she put pressure on her assessor, Kate would definitely pull the trigger and shoot a litterbug dead when we fade to black. And that’s the show we turned up for. Not the half-show we got.

 

IMMEDIATE FOLLOW-UP: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

This immediate follow-up is a month later. In last month’s worrying episode, I realised loads of electronic messages clogged up my digital arteries. All of these messages were read. Most had been dealt with. And yet. There they sat, waiting for some beam of light to land upon them before they would shift into nothingness.
   Over 300 messages. By the end of the blog post, I’d erased just over half. How did I fare, after that? What’s the update? I ditched another 100 or so, since then. That’s the stockpile. I was on top of a hell of a lot more than that, as new messages poured in.
   I’ll read new messages as soon as I can. Deal with them when able. Then delete what I don’t need. Roughly 50 messages lingered all month, between blog posts. But not the same 50. Gradually, I eliminated the overflow from the old dusty e-mail tributaries. New material arrived.
   And I was determined not to let the iceberg form all over again. On a daily basis, I took a flamethrower to the slow formation of ice. What’s left? Around 50 e-mails, all read, all waiting for the stream of fire that will delete them. And these are official or semi-official messages.
   Something comes up. I read the scribble. Make a response. Now I wait a few days for a government department to sort things out. Or I take in a parcel, and check it twice. Parcel received. Delete parcel delivery message. That’s where I am, right this minute…
   I don’t know how may blog followers receive an e-mail notification when I post these online. How many e-mail messages do you send out, next to the ones you receive? Depends on the time of year. It’s winter. December. There are a lot of festive sales.
   Those mean a great deal to companies. So much so, that I receive a lone festive e-mail from companies that never bother their arses to contact me at any other time. I bought a thing from the company once, and that was it. At least they aren’t bombarding me with adverts.
   Of course, I get that advert line at the top when I check on my e-mails. I could banish it by upgrading for money. But it is a minor inconvenience. It’s not something I ever click on accidentally. Must be careful. Lately, a few spam messages evaded the filters. That’s a constant war.
   The filter picks up a new trend, though. M.e.s.s.a.g.e.s separated by dots. Is that to evade the spam filter? Just makes all your fraudster e-mails look like they were put together by incompetent ten-year-olds. Competent ten-year-olds are far better at spamming.
   What’s the worst sort of e-mail? The government one put out by a department of people who didn’t think it through. You know the sort. Hello, we are a genuine government department and not scammers, honest, guv’nor. I remove myself from the presence of the offending message, and check the official website independently.
   Oh, fuck. The message was real.
   E-mail nonsense does occur at the other end. It’s not all about receiving messages and dealing with them. Give us your e-mail to enter this site and we’ll set up an account for you. Or sign in with your e-mail. Then you are judged. Harshly. In the meanest light. When…
   You type in the first character of your e-mail address, and the site rejects your activity.
   That’s not an e-mail address we recognise. Please type the full address: more than one character. We’ve been set up to respond this way in a hateful manner, but we don’t hate you personally. No. We treat everyone this way. Unless, of course, you copied and pasted your e-mail across in one go. In that case, we have a separate, more cutting, response. It’s in red ink, too. But also, emboldened, italicised, and underlined. Y’know. For emphasis. But we’ll spare you that here.
   The electronic message. A lone thundercloud that sometimes develops into a massive weather system. If I see six new e-mails at once, it means six companies e-mailed me at once. Or one sent me variations on a theme six times over. This isn’t something that happens in the physical world, unless it is in the run-up to Christmas.
   Only at Christmas would you receive six letters through the letterbox in the one posting. Festive greetings cards, all. Maybe, on one of those blue moons, a government body will spool out six flavours of the same message across six envelopes. Helps with cost-cutting, you understand.
   If it isn’t your e-mail, it’ll be texts. As I type this, it looks as though the whole of Scotland just got put on blast over a ban on prescribing sedatives for fear of flying. This has been on the go for quite a while, but the text messages are in full flow now that winter rolled in. We were all warned about this in the summer. Or what passes for summer.
   The communication that went away is that of the door-to-door sales dogsbody. First the internet killed it. Then the Covid Pandemic put the final nail in the coffin. We don’t, as a rule, resort to the seance for further chatter. I’ve had few random telephone calls…
   A concerned gentleman, hoping to connect with his lady love. And a drunk woman, who thought it was talk like a parrot day. This is associated with talking like a pirate, but for people who are more pissed. I’m off the blocks like an Olympic sprinter when it comes to terminating drunken wrong number calls and barring the pissed offender.
   It’s quick, too, to hang up on the call that warns my visa is up for renewal and that I may be deported. From Scotland. Where I live. As a citizen. I would laugh more at this, but the irritable Chinese robot lady reading from a script is ALWAYS the irritable Chinese robot lady reading from a script. I never reach the bit about handing over my bank account. The blocked number is one digit away from the previous blocked number. Eventually, the calls stopped. Why? Because they knew I’d been deported by then. Obviously.
   Where’s the problem? It’s a dud company selling through Amazon. You don’t receive the goods, and Amazon refunds you. I’m sure Amazon is perfect when it comes to securing your information. Strip-mining information was never the dud company’s intent. I’m sure they really wanted to undercut everyone else on price when you were buying that thing.
   Can’t lay the blame at Amazon’s door. Not solely. People you know get caught up in this stuff, and their address book is plundered in some online chicanery. It’s so hard to tell fake from real, now. That’s why I have to quintuple-check shady-looking government messages that are, lamentably, the real deal.
   Interrupted by an Amazon delivery, which set off a blast of e-mail deletions. The trouble is ordering things based on price. Separate orders. One voucher per purchase. Okay. Split the voucher purchases up. Separate order e-mails. Then separate e-mails again to say your parcel is on the way. If Amazon decides not to be your delivery agent on the final mile of the journey, that triggers another wave of messages from Royal Mail at best and Yodel at worst.
   Followed by yet another tidal surge, telling you all these things are delivered tomorrow. And another wave the next day, telling you it’ll be here today. Unless there’s a delay. More ripples in the water. And then the delivery e-mails. Once the package is safely in your hands and it works, it is time to delete e-mails.
   But. Things bundled in a purchase aren’t always bundled in a big box for convenience. One or two items will reach you at a later date. Sifting through messages, I seek an earlier time. There never was one. The internet made shopping more convenient, and not less so.
   A mountain of e-mail messages. Blown up, cliff face by cliff face, as delivery drivers arrive in rain. Looks as though one package has gone astray. Perhaps that’ll be fixed. I have a two-hour slot. Interrupted by another delivery driver. These guys are growing wetter and wetter by the second in driving rain.
   Luckily, everything in the parcel was wrapped in plastic. The parcel itself, which I intend to recycle, took a pure battering over the course of the time it took the guy to reach the door. I’ll have to dry the empty parcel out before it can be prepared to meet its ultimate fate: recycling. But I don’t want to create a small bin of mush. So, the parcel waits in front of a radiator.
   Just as I wait for an extra parcel delivery driver. My interruption there was, itself, interrupted by the news that the stray parcel is on its way. Nine stops to go. Well. That should consume the rest of the two-hour slot. In the meantime, I must again tackle the deletion of at least one e-mail…
   Seventeen e-mails later. That was infuriating, as some e-mails have to stay in place, even though one item on a two-item list has been delivered. Still waiting on that other item. The details have been obscured for reasons of privacy. It is a spy book. Does Amazon routinely not show the cover of a spy book? Is that itself a form of cover?
   Last month, I had over 300 e-mails, all read, waiting in the train station on a branch line train that was never coming. This month, I am firing rocket launchers at everything, as fast as I can muster. How many messages did I delete today? The day isn’t over until the fat lady sings. Or until a soaking driver hands over the last lump of sopping-wet cardboard.

 

THE E-MAIL MOUNTAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Staring at an e-mail account, I realise I’ve been swamped. Swamped by a mountain of e-mail. Why I haven’t been mountained by a swamp of e-mail, I can’t say. I imagine that involves travelling to a swamp, where the internet reception is questionable and alligator incidents are high.
   There, a doughty mountain lands upon you with a mighty splash and lingering bubbles.
   Any alligators who can reach what’s left of you will have slim pickings. I could turn that into a movie reference by imagining the actor Slim Pickens waving his hat as he rides the plummeting mountain to an ill-fated rendezvous from the upper atmosphere to the depths of the bayou.
   But no.
   I am not truly swamped by e-mail. An e-mail comes in and I read it. I may even act as a result. There is no swamp-water rising over my digital hiking boots. Typically, I see a few e-mail notifications at a time. Occasionally, a company will send me six small e-mails at once instead of a medium one that would have covered the same boggy ground.
   If wild e-mail sources come in at the same time, and one is dropping six messages, I might have as many as a dozen to get through at once. That’s loads. Loads. Almost all e-mails are quick to deal with. So I am never truly swamped by messages. Unread messages? I read them. And that’s that. They are no longer unread, and the world sleeps peacefully through until dawn.
   Over the past while, though, and that’s a scientific term, past while, facts, bitches, I’ve been swamped by the stuff I’ve read. Yes, I have more than one e-mail address. There’s one for my YouTube channel. Another address is for most of the stuff I deal with. I keep an almost unused e-mail address for things I have to process once in that famous blue moon.
   And I have e-mail addresses that are back-up addresses for the main addresses, in case I need to change a password. If I see a password change request over in my reserve e-mail, I know I’m the one who made the request. Or, once in a grainy sickly moon, I see someone has typed my e-mail address by mistake and I’ve been sent a blip.
   Reminds me of the time I was subscribed to a service on the basis that the user typed my address into the website by mistake. As usual with things like that, you bypass the e-mail’s brief subject header, and go to the website and see if the company is legit. Of course, I couldn’t sign in. I didn’t know the password. But I knew a woman set up the account linked to my e-mail.
   Now I was getting company e-mails. The internet makes it easy to unsubscribe from those things. Except when it doesn’t. I had to navigate a non-existent account and the haunted internet country lanes of disinformation technology to be free of the spectre. One digital exorcism later, and I was fine. With one mighty click, I was free of an account I hadn’t set up.
   I doubt the woman concerned had a great online experience with the company. But I’d erased my connection to her account she couldn’t receive any messages to, so that’s a form of progress. Blips happen.
   The great spam net catches all the fraudsters. I no longer receive classic calls for help. You go to send the message to spam and accidentally open it instead. Oh no. My bank account was under threat. Not the same bank account at the top of the e-mail that was listed at the bottom of the e-mail. I think they wanted to look after my third bank account.
   Or the woman who met me somewhere, you remember, and saw me walking around her apartment. I think the fraudster meant to say she saw me walking around my apartment. Calm down, stalker-girl. Where did she see me, when I was meant to be casually walking around her apartment? Was she in it, sitting at her stylish breakfast bar, saying nothing. Refusing to question my presence in her abode?
   She was questioning that later, in the e-mail, looking to hook up with my bank account. I suspect she was a Russian named Ivan operating from an internet address in Paris. That’s usually how the trail goes. E-mail blips. Fraudsters. Genuine companies, with a dose of the internet shits, dropping six messages instead of one.
   I read or dismiss. Sometimes, I read and dismiss. But, damn it, lately I haven’t ERASED. That’s my problem today. A whole bunch of messages I’ve read…and dealt with, but not dealt with. Why leave messages in the in-box at all, after they are done? In the case of low-frequency communication, the e-mail doesn’t deserve its own folder…
   With that in mind, I could delete the e-mail after concluding business. True. But maybe, much later, I’ll need a handy reference. And there it sits. Could be time-sensitive…in the sense that it should sit there for a time and then be taken out behind the barn for a special picnic.
   I’m staring at a back-up e-mail address. There’s one e-mail in there, reminding me that I’ve associated a low-maintenance account with that particular e-mail address. And now I am staring at the main e-mail address I use. I am glaring at all of the e-mail accounts…
   Okay, some are just there for use in emergencies. If I forget a password for one, a message goes to the other. Whether used a lot or barely at all, I see I have e-mails that I’ve read. Nothing unread. I’m all over that action. Well. There’s the back-up account with an e-mail I’ve read…
   And there’s the main account where it’s all read, too. But I have this swirling pool of. Wait. Three messages just came in. All are…disposable. And all three are now…deleted. Easy, isn’t it. Except for the swirling pool of. Fuck. Yes, 317 messages. All read. Many waiting for the executioner’s block.
   How did I let it come to this? I didn’t. It was gremlins. Gremlins, under the stairs. They wait for night, and then strike as one hour chimes into the next…when the fabric of the universe lies at its weakest. Some say only the tiny mice, living in the spaces between raindrops, can battle those gremlins. Very tiny, suspiciously dry, mice, with anti-gremlin weapons. Every time an e-mail is deleted, a tiny mouse defeats an obnoxious gremlin. And the tiny mouse gains a pair of wings.
   Massive fuck-off red dragon wings. Mess with me, bitches! For the full effect, I guess you have to say that last bit in a squeaky voice. Unless you already possess a tiny mouse voice, in which case, squeak on. In the time it took me to type this far, I dealt with three messages.
   Incoming!
   My legs, my legs!
   Is there a doctor in the house?
   Why would these dead messages pile up? For a number of reasons. A month ago, I was at 200 messages and considered blogging about it back then. I foolishly thought to myself, self, but in a Boris Karloff sort of accent, self, I’ll have thrown them all in the incinerator by next week.
   And the e-mails, too.
   Yet here I am, one month on, and a hundred messages deeper. There are reasons. Some things are closed off, finished, in terms of e-mail exchange. But I’m waiting on a parcel. So the physical business has to close before I can go back and take a scythe to the overgrown field of reminders.
   I’ve sent a parcel and I am receiving a bunch of e-mails concerning that transaction. When I receive word that the parcel has reached its destination, the whole lot can go. When five or six things generate five or six messages, that’s a lot of digital nonsense hovering over the airport, waiting to land.
   Customer service items that are in their own infinite holding-pattern. Stuff that should be safe to delete, yet hasn’t quite reached the DELETE BY date. Let’s see how many of them can go. Absolutely, this used to be so much easier when it was so much easier.
   I’d look at a short list, see several finished e-mails had ripened in the sun, and send those packing. Now the ones that can go are hidden in a field full of others that should stay for now. Facing a list of twenty things, seven up for deletion, the reaper’s scythe fell swift and merciless.
   Now, I stare at a few in a field of many. Should they stay or should they go? Don’t delete the thing that wasn’t deleted for a reason. It’s still there for a reason. That’s the case with every e-mail there, now. How many more will come in as I type? I thought nailing duplicate files dead in an archive was an endless task.
   Waves crash upon the shore, and it is the job of these waves to crash a little more. I lift the scythe and slash without reprieve. Chop, and 317 messages don’t bite the dust. Some of them do. I’m down to 286. Weeding with a flamethrower should feel satisfying. But all I think about is the smell of napalm.
   I’m down to 149.

 

THE HIGH-PITCHED WHINE OF DAN O’BANNON’S COFFIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Yes, that high-pitched whine you hear is Dan O’Bannon’s coffin spinning out of the grave and into low orbit. I watched the second half of the ALIEN: EARTH TV show. (From episode five on, I wrote escape capsule hit-pieces as episodes aired, just so you know.)
   In my earlier blog post on the first four episodes, I wrote that the key feature of any story featuring the ALIEN franchise is this: at some point, smart people in space must do dumb things for the story to move forward.
   Damn it. Episode five acknowledges this in the script itself. Proof of how stupid smart people can be. It’s built into the story. Too close to the alien bone?
   Now…I glossed over a whole bunch of things from the first four episodes. Take episode four, for example. In which Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling becomes an alien snake-charmer. Or something. She can talk to the animals.
   But it is time to return to those earlier episodes in talking about smart people in space doing dumb things. In episode one, you get the idea that something goes horribly wrong on the spaceship that looks awfully like Ridley Scott’s idea of a spaceship on the inside.
   But we aren’t shown that story.
   We see glimpses of the set.
   A load of viewers believed…if you build a whole set and don’t show the story in full, then there’ll be a flashback episode later. Explaining all of that nasty stuff in gory detail. As sure as chest-bursting follows a meal, that’s what we got in episode five. Must use the set. Built it for something. Use it.
   There were hints in earlier episodes of what went down. But we really must see the whole thing. And this is the point at which Dan O’Bannon’s coffin achieves escape velocity.
   Here’s the flashback set-up. Two aliens escape their containment pods. They hug faces. One member of the crew dies in an ill-advised surgical procedure. Acid, baby. The other is placed in a cryogenic suspension pod.
   Oopsie.
   The alien bursts out of that chest and flees the pod. Glass breaks when the plot demands. Hiding in the vast ship, somewhere, the alien creates the perfect set-up for an alien jailbreak. This li’l alien can sneak through vents and ignore holes in the plot or some shit, and reaches the other aliens in their safe glass containers. Mm.
   That would be okay. Believable, if you squint hard enough. One alien slithers in, fucks shit up, and slithers out again. I’d buy that. But I’m not purchasing what actually happens. The aliens in the lab stage a jailbreak by opening their prisons from the inside.
   They’re smarter than the average bear, see.
   This is dumber than a box of moon rocks. Use the alien that already fucking escaped. Let it wreak havoc in the lab. It’s the alien, for fuck’s sake. But…no. When these other aliens aren’t solving the Times crossword or Mr Rubik’s fiendish cube, they are staging a jailbreak. By…
   Now this bit is the worst bit in the episode. Breaks all the rules. It is drummed into anyone who ever sat in a science class. And it applies to the lab. NO FOOD AND DRINK IN THE LAB. Ever. True, this is an ALIEN gig…so smart people must do dumb things in space for the story to move forward over a cliff.
   There’s a lot in earlier episodes set up to pay off in this flashback, and then advance the story by switching to the here and now. But the golden opporchancity was there, and they blew it. Let the alien, from ALIEN, do its alien thing in fucking shit up. Then the new aliens can cut loose and do their alien thing. Don’t keep sidelining the original monster.
   Instead, we see the Skullfucker Octoball try to take on the adult alien. But there aren’t any eyes to pluck out. As fucking expected. At the end of the episode, we dip back into BLADE RUNNER territory with the appearance of Lady Yutani…and, for once, she isn’t on the phone to Mr Morrow the cyborg. She’s there, in person, with a bunch of mad-looking corporate samurai dudes. Send in the clones. Don’t worry. They’re here.
   The ALIEN movie gave us an alien horror with a dose of corporate evil thrown in. Here, the corporate comedy hijinks take the main BLADE RUNNER stage. In flashback land, there’s a saboteur on board, ooh, blasting bits of the spaceship into the cosmos.
   I’m surprised the alien didn’t just turn to the camera and ask the audience what the fuck it was doing here. In Michael Caine’s accent.
   You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
   It’s one of those TV shows. If you can’t work out which of these characters we are meant to care for, root for the alien.
   Am I meant to care for Mark Musk Elon Zuckerberg and his obsession with Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling? I’d have preferred a woman in the role of the trillionaire. Blonde. With a roll-neck sweater and a fixation over Steve Jobs.
   Her company, being in the ALIEN universe, has to be called Theranos Thanatos. I still wouldn’t care about the character, but there’d be far more scope for comedy. Yes, it’s true. I’ve watched these episodes, and…I only care about the original alien. Neglected. Ignored. Forgotten. Sliced up. Missing in action. And then lit brightly in a fucking fish tank.
   When we reach episode five and a flashback containing some xenomorph action, we are treated to microwaved leftovers from an earlier cinematic experience. A flurry of half-hearted positive reviews out there in the dark all mutter out of the side of the mouth when declaring…
   You know, we’ve had worse out of this franchise.
   And so on. This is, at heartless heart, The Emperor’s New Skinsuit. The only thing connecting ALIEN to BLADE RUNNER is the director who used similar production techniques and items in both films.
   So why turn this ALIEN TV show into BLADE RUNNER by another name? Yes, it has been strangely watchable. I could be at the top of a skyscraper, on the corner, looking down on a police chase on Fucked Up Street…while a petrol tanker’s brakes fail over on Beyond All Recognition Avenue.
   Strangely watchable. And there’s nothing I can do about it except look away. But I look. Would this show reach physical media? Disney releases are patchy and unpredictable, that way. Would I buy a 4K set? No. This is one…and very done.
   There are loads of ALIEN and PREDATOR films out there that I didn’t buy. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even watch a bunch of the PREDATOR ones. ALIEN should never have been a franchise. Luckily, HIGHLANDER was never a franchise. Fortunately, THE MATRIX was a one-off. And INDIANA JONES. A trilogy, thank fuck.
   BACK TO THE FUTURE stuck to the plan. No more movies after the third one. Sadly, over my dead body might apply here once Zemeckis hangs up his director’s hat for the very last time. No one is going to remake that story with the main character as Marsha McFly. The crush sub-plot was icky enough with Marty.
   (Also, technically, the main character in BACK TO THE FUTURE is the most important time traveller – the dog.)
   What of ALIEN: THE WILDERNESS YEARS as a franchise? Battle Angel Wendy. FAUX RUNNER. Do Androids Dream of Monsters Under the Bed? I should go on, but you get the point. Oh, very well. ASLAN VERSUS ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS CALVIN AND HOBBES: MA’AM, THIS IS A WENDY’S. Now I’m done.
   We have Wendy the snake-charmer or The Alien Whisperer. I suspect a lot of the show is going nowhere. And no more is this evident than in episode six. The Fluff. It’s an episode about padding and nothing much going on. If that.
   Once more, we question basic lab techniques. No one should be alone in the lab. And the aliens should all really have a lab each. Think the show missed a trick, there. Each alien needs its own unique lab.
   Yes, give each lab a sense of character and an alien in it. At least then the show would have some character. But no, we’ll keep these lions in one room and in glass cases. Yes, if you were paying attention in the previous episodes that didn’t lull you to sleep, then you’d know there’s this other alien. Awaiting a slow tease of an appearance.
   And we get to the goods in this episode. Not worth the wait. The central plank of creating your superhero team, those lost boys and girls, is giving the audience synthetic characters who aren’t affected by the aliens. Creating synthetic characters. There’s an idea that’s a hostage to fortune.
   Superheroes aren’t affected by the aliens. Except…this is an ALIEN franchise offshoot, and so we’ll be fucking around with that expectation more than once. Battle Angel Wendy got into a tussle with an alien and lived to tell the tale. She’s all better now.
   In this episode, we see feeding time at the zoo go horribly wrong for a synthetic character we don’t have energy to care for. Dolly the sheep just sheeps in, fucks shit up, and sheeps some more.
   The Skullfucker Octoball in charge of the sheep is biding its time, playing tenth-dimensional chess, and shit. Oh no. The CGI fly eats wobots for bweakfast. For a top secret research facility, I notice the cameras on Fantasy Island become quite useless and unwatched when the plot demands this.
   Characters stumble around in and out of various situations. The Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character was damaged but she’s all better now. They gave her a mind-wipe, but didn’t warn anyone else on the island about not telling her that. So now she knows she had a mind-wipe after being told. Would have been better off with a facecloth and some mild soap.
   Inevitably, after much padding, and more fan service out of focus in the background, we reach the hugging of a face. And when this face was hugged, I found it hard not to laugh out loud. I half-expected the actor to start moonwalking, and I just couldn’t take it seriously.
   What’s that? The guy who was fired in this episode didn’t make it off the island? Instead he was dragged into one of those standard air vents large enough to fit several plot holes through? Explain why the secure lab needs a massive ALIEN AIR VENT™ at floor level. Or, indeed, at any level. Explain. Show your working.
   There were so many other ways to build up to SOME CHARACTER WE DON’T CARE ABOUT™ being hugged in the face by an alien. I say we take off and nuke the entire show from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
   Damn.
   It’s sad seeing the alien in a well-lit glass cage doing sweet fuck-all. Not an ALIEN moment. The same is true of the actress playing Lady Yutani. She finally gets her teeth into a scene. Regrettably, it’s a scene from a BLADE RUNNER show no one asked for.
   All the padding, all the waffle, questioning what it is to be human…the fluff belongs in another type of story. Is there a place for it here? There is. In small doses. But not as padding. So much for episode six, which, in the closing seconds, attempts to make the Skullfucker Octoball the star of this show.
   IT ISN’T.
   What stays with me in this episode? Pointlessness. There’s a talk about what Wendy will do. She could be family to her brother. But there are loftier goals. She should develop travel faster than the speed of light, and explore the universe. Wendy must make the right choice.
   Except…there’s nothing to stop her eternal self being family to her brother until he dies of old age. Then she can explore the universe after. She can have it all. It isn’t EITHER/OR. The show flounders arse-deep in too many moments like that.
   And then there was episode seven.
   Two of the Very Lost Boys lead their pal the scientist dude into the jungle. Basically, Lennie is being taken to see the rabbits. (Spoiler for another story.) The Peter Pan framework should have been referenced with a light touch. Too late for that. The whole show lumbers along, top-heavy with enforced symbolism.
   You’d be better off watching The Lost Boys. That’s a movie about rebellious Kiefer Sutherland being all rebellious and shit.
   The different spaghetti strands of storytelling veer off and converge just about as messily as you’d expect. Those behind the show have certainly seen the movie Predator. So it is time to throw in a bit of that in the jungle. But not too much, lest the show be accused of turning into Predator.
   Normally I’d say Wendy’s plan comes across as one of the worst plans in the history of science fiction television. But I can’t stop there. Wendy’s plan is one of the worst plans in the history of plans.
   I’ll release my tame alien as a distraction, so we can escape Fantasy Island.
   Again, we come back to this thing of the alien in a glass cage, sidelined by the shenanigans elsewhere. Characters queue up in slow motion, waiting for death. When death comes, it arrives with CGI rapidity.
   They know, making this show, that scenes of the alien escaping and killing lab techs in bright light…well, those scenes are just not going to cut it. So we’ll switch to the security cameras, for a more obscured look at the CGI tomfoolery.
   And so it goes, again, when in the jungle. An instant problem arrives. Soldiers. An instant fix arrives. Predator. The alien. This time the fight is in broad daylight, so we have to obscure our alien by using the bushes.
   Perhaps more than any other episode, this episode feels like it is about to (chest) burst into being a musical. Soldiers with bad timing turn up to miss the main event. Characters with no planning flit in and out of sight.
   It takes a very long forty minutes for Wendy, Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright, and Communist Manifesto Guy from ANDOR to reach the boat, the boat, and we don’t even have Mr Roarke or Tattoo standing by to wave them farewell.
   There’s one episode to watch. Before it airs, I wonder what it sets up. This whole show is about a mission to bring alien samples back for study. But even that mission was off the back of an earlier unseen sequence in which a whole bunch of people died. We were told this.
   So we may yet see another prequel. Where are we, by episode seven? Number of deaths so far? Don’t care. Number of characters worth caring about? Don’t care. Trillionaire-ism is bad. Corporations are bad. People are no better. Just bet on the alien for the win.
   What else didn’t I care about on the show? Screens. They flashed up with information on the aliens. We live in a TV age of visuals that are clear enough. You can pause the data dumps and read snippets of what the aliens are all about.
   And I just didn’t care. We’re told about the Skullfucker Octoball. And we’re told about the really fucking boring plant thing. I’m waiting on the base being overrun by plants when the inevitable fire/explosion sequence kicks in. And then the killer plant can really go to work. Presuming it crawls into a handy ventilation shaft where it can survive the fire/explosion.
   No, I didn’t care about the text screens. They could have flashed Surprised in the Butt by Ripley’s Xenomorph Lover: a Chuck Tingle Dinosaur Romance on one of those screens for all the difference those screens made.
   And so. To episode ate eight. The scenewy’s pwetty. Be vewy vewy quiet. I’m hunting humans wabbits humans wabbits for a story. We go a li’l bit Predator, a li’l bit country, a li’l bit rock ’n’ roll, and a bit Terminator 2.
   Two Terminator machines go at it in a lab, in a rather inconsequential fight…in an inconsequential episode. This is the last episode in the show, and I expected the deaths to mount up. Instead, we had a whole lot of nothing.
   Okay. There were deaths. Soldiers, on the island, dying under the alien’s teeth and claws. Don’t forget the tail. There’s a good story here, stumbling through the ruins of other stories. I can see what they were trying to go for. Alas…
   The entire episode does, indeed, act as set-up for the next series. I expected a whole bunch of characters to die. You have practically the whole bunch in a room. One bomb and it is done. But no.
   Yutani doesn’t even get to phone in her performance here. She’s flashed up on the screen as a reminder of her existence. There was so much noodling around, too much padding, for the late arrival of her army to make a difference.
   That army should have arrived earlier in the story, full force, with chaos the result. Chaos in which the monsters get to feed. Here’s an idea. In the future, just have jail cells that are locked the old-fashioned way. With a physical key. Don’t operate the cages by electricity.
   It’s the dumbest thing. All the creatures, and the other prisoners in this narrative, are locked in electrically-powered jails. What if the power goes? There’s a back-up. What if the back-up goes? NOTHING. The fucking doors stay locked, you cunts!
   Wait. Let me tell you how I really feel.
   Welcome to Fantasy Island. What’s the plot? THE BLACK HOLE. That’s the hole the story fell into. At least the robots on that Disney production were amusing. Welcome to Fantasy Island. But, hey. The scenewy is pwetty.
   Everyone is in a rush to be the next model, rendering the last model obsolete. That notion does a few handstands and backflips as characters manoeuvre around each other…to no great effect.
   The Peter Pan stuff sputtered out episodes ago. Boy Genius isn’t Peter Pan. He’s a symbolic coded fictional watercolour painting of Elon Musk refusing to accept an autistic trans daughter. Misunderstood. He’s misunderstood. And irritating. We don’t even get his plan out of his lips.
   He sends the minds of children into artificial bodies. They’ll have access to the whole of human learning. And they can then improve the process so that adult minds can transfer into human bodies. That’s when Elon Zuckerberg makes his move. But that isn’t even a plot here.
   There’s a movie worth watching to reach a conclusion about the handling of the Boy Genius in this show…
   The Dirty Dozen. In that film, one of the dozen is the character you love to hate. You cannot wait for Archer Maggott to die. When’s he getting shot? That’s Archer Maggot’s story right there.
   And so it should be with the Boy Genius. He serves no purpose beyond being set up as an evil doll-figure who is bitch-slapped by an alien at just the right time. Boy Genius deserves to be on the way out by episode three.
   Even that Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character, who appeared to die in episode seven, made it back for episode eight. The two mad scientists assisting the Boy Genius are still in play by the end of this show. And, spoiler, one of them is dead.
   Adrian Edmondson, as some sort of cybernetic Odd Job henchman, minus the bowler hat, is still ticking along merrily by the end as well.
   Yes, the killer plant finally makes its move, and this is as underwhelming as you’d expect. That played out like a random encounter with a Dungeons & Dragons monster in a killer dungeon.
   All dungeons are killer dungeons, whether science fiction or fantasy. In this killer dungeon, though, the usual suspects make it through. It’s almost as though there’s some evil hidden agenda. An evil corporate agenda. To produce another series.
   You had one job, television. One job. To make sure the alien would kill a whole lotta people (and synthetics) in a show that sidelined the alien in favour of letting a whole lotta people (and synthetics) live. The final episode could’ve done with being a bit more final.
   This TV show sounds a bit like an earlier spin-off. ALIEN: EARTH isn’t a comic book series. ALIENS: EARTH WAR is. I enjoyed the raw energy of those comic book stories. This TV blip has a hard task, true…
   There shouldn’t be a franchise, yet there is. So what’s the problem? Trade on the original story. Add something new. Avoid fan service. Remember when? We fucking do. Stop reminding us.
   We want the familiar, but it must be different. Advance on it. But not too different. So you won’t satisfy any audience. There are people out there in deep space, declaring there is only one ALIEN movie. There certainly shouldn’t be two television shows.
   We don’t need to see Ian Holm’s acting dug up from the vaults in some nonsensical scene. (I know I’ve seen that travesty, but I refused to believe it.) If you must give us something, give us something of substance. Evil Trillionaire Boy Genius could have experimented on the alien and realised that – if you solve the acid problem – then the alien blood might cure cancer.
   That would be a better twist than anything, everything, on this show. Was there a scrap of merit? Discovering the lost boys and girls had their own graveyard on Fantasy Island. Aaaaaand…that was about it.
   Imagine watching a TV show and then turning to Mark Verhieden’s comic books for something bright, fiery, and with its own peculiar atmosphere. Those comics had the same hard task. Give us more of the same, but not too samey. Verhieden was allowed to use the characters of Newt and Hicks…
   Until a shitty movie sequel came along and killed them off. Then the names were changed to protect the indifferent. They were changed back for the collected editions.
   So, yes, there was a bit of fan service in the comic books. But Verhieden tried to give us the atmosphere of an ALIEN story. Not a BLADE RUNNER one or a TERMINATOR one. Or Peter Pan with robots thrown in.
   The television show feels sterile. Airless. Unloved. It feels unwatched even as you watch it, and that’s no good. My view, after watching? I turned to the comic books for a better experience.
   What surprised me? That I watched every episode. Please. For fuck’s sake. Don’t make a second show.