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A 2007 compilation of 3 of Valve’s new releases, all too small to publish individually, each perhaps easily overshadowed by bigger releases. When teamed together, they all balance each other off to provide a rounded package of some of the most progressive game design to hit the mainstream in ages.

Puzzle adventure game Portal takes a simple, if heady, idea — magic doors that can connect two points — and extrapolates it to its logical extremes. Team Fortress 2 boils down online competitive games to their raw forms, then rebuilds from there. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 continues the epilogue to Valve’s modern masterpiece, with a few engine enhancements and improved design over the previous Episode.

Then to provide context for Episode 2 and to make the whole package feel meatier, Valve also tossed in the original Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. So in total there are five games — the original Half-Life 2, two games that build on that game’s narrative, one game that builds on its aggressive action elements, and one that builds on its contemplative problem-solving elements; three games that balance the male and female aspects, one that explores the macho, and one laced with the feminine.

At the time, a themed compilation like this was more or less unprecedented. In the years since, several more compilations have shown up in downloadable form (often over Valve’s Steam service). Yet The Orange Box still stands more or less alone as a testament to Valve’s lateral sense of design.

The Incas are the best of the bunch, as far as South American empires go. Whereas the Mayas were poets and astronomers and the Aztecs were warriors, the Incas were architects and planners. What I didn't realize was just how short their heyday was -- only about 100 years. Had the Spanish not come, preceded by their wave of smallpox, one wonders how the Incas might have developed.

I had always appreciated Machu Picchu for its exotic location and architecture, and the mystery surrounding its discovery. This is the stuff that established the template of the adventurer archaeologist, that later brought us figures like Indiana Jones. What this documentary has brought me is a new appreciation of the planning and rigor that went into the structure's development.

There's nothing arbitrary about the process. For all the reasons not to build a palace in Machu Picchu's location, there is a certain political, mystical, and engineering logic to its location. Furthermore, the palace wasn't simply plopped on top of the mountain; nearly 60% of the work is under the ground, in extensive drainage and support structures both to prevent erosion and ensure a steady supply of fresh water.

This is fascinating stuff, and well-told. If you've a whiff of interest in ancient culture or architecture, this documentary is a goodun.

A Serious Man is a mid-level Coen movie; Not as grand as Fargo or No Country, not as humble as The Man Who Wasn't There. Not as memorable as Lebowski, not as forgettable as Intolerable Cruelty. Not as good as Barton Fink or as bad as The Ladykillers. I guess you could chuck it in the pile with Miller's Crossing, except it's more interesting and more distinctively Coen than that.

The movie is sort of a light comedy spread thin over a light drama about a middle-class suburban guy whose life is falling apart. His wife is leaving him, his kids are indifferent to him, he has problems at work...

Acutally, you know what it is? It's a Jewish American Beauty. It's about all of the same things -- the stifling mundaneness of suburbia and the status quo, a midlife crisis that offers a brief glimpse of freedom before it comes crashing down, wonder at the nature of existence -- with a few extra trips to the rabbi, and the convoluted parables that come out of them.

In the hours after watching I'm sure I had something more incisive to say. A week or two later, the movie has faded into a muddle.

Peep Show is a bit of secret brilliance. Good job on Hulu for getting on the train; perhaps it will reach a wider audience now.

After an amazing first season, the show ambled along for a few years on its own inertia. Since series 4, the show has not only regained its mojo; it has ramped the bizarreness and the discomfort to inspired new levels, all the while keeping Mark's and Jeremy's characters right where we recognize them. There's just enough character development to open up new situations and to keep them from devolving into self-parody. Meanwhile the entire world is going bonkers around them.

Man Jam is a pretty good one. This is the one where Jez gets the job as record promoter, and decides to sign up the band that had just dropped him. The best part is probably his image suggestions to Super Hans. Meanwhile Mark is... what is he doing in this episode? Oh, he's being all creepy about Dobby while playing FDR versus the Cybermen with Gerrard. Standard stuff there.

Without actually checking the credits, the animation here reminds me strongly of the fellow who did Aeon Flux and that cartoon about Alexander the Great. It has that same lanky angularity, and the almost grotesque caricature of the human form. Granted, if it is his work then it's a more refined and mainstream version of his style.

As with most of these direct-to-DVD DC movies, this appears to have been based on a well-known arc from the comics -- a sort of a "what-if" tale that explored the last months of Superman's life as he slowly died of a sort of super cancer brought on by over-exposure to the normally healing radiation of our sun.

It's all well-done enough, and it passes the time. There's something lacking in the pace. After the first act, the movie meanders with little hint as to where it wants to go or what exactly its narrative priorities are. My wife wandered away halfway through, and I was half inclined to follow. Perhaps it's due to condensing the events of a lengthy serial into a single short narrative, as there's a fair amount procedural storytelling: first this happened, then this happened, then this other thing...

The ending is a bit understated as well, which in itself wouldn't be a problem. When one has spent half the movie waiting for something relevant to happen, though, one does expect the conclusion to repay that patience. I'm not sure if that happened here.

Ah well. It's pretty good. I'll still take Justice League Unlimited any day.

Harry Potter has never been great literature, and the movies have never been great cinema. Whereas the books are a genial mishmash of well-selected 20th century children's authors, the films have struggled to find their own integrity outside the Scholastic merchandising machine.

The first couple of movies are not so much films as greatest hits reels of the most memorable moments from the books, translated as literally as possible to screen, with barely a thread of contextual material to bind them together. Generally speaking with each sequel the scripts stand a little better on their own feet, the pacing gets less frantic, the direction less arbitrarily showy, and the central performances grow more confident.

The Half-Blood Prince is the sixth movie, and the second directed by David Yates. Although not as masterful as Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell, Yates does solid work here, keeping a steady pace without getting too hyper and linking shots or scenes with some lovely (often heavily effects-laden) camerawork. At one point there's a long swoop out the window of a moving train, and into another window further down. Gratuitous, perhaps. Yet it does give the viewer a welcome sense of context and scope, binding together a world that is easy to dismiss when presented as a series of scene fragments and jump cuts.

At this point the story itself is beginning to feel like standard pulp melodrama, in place of the quirky British satire of the earlier volumes. How much of that is the continually literal adaptation, which prefers fact and action over manner and nuance, and how much of it is just the nature of the beast, I am not prepared to speculate. The books wore on me long before volume six, and I figure that the films have become adequate enough to fill me in on any significant developments at a much lower level of investment.

I suppose that's the best summation I can give. If you haven't read the books, and just want to know the story, the films have become good enough. Considering where they started, that's something of an achievement.

So that's where this Numberwang meme comes from.

I don't know how they do it, but the two guys from Peep Show manage to keep two completely different comedy shows going at the same time, with the same cast, and maintain the same quality of writing across both shows across the years.

Whereas Peep Show is one of your modern post-sitcom awkward comedic semi-serials, That Mitchell and Webb Look is a sketch comedy along the lines of Chapelle's Show or Kids in the Hall. Unlike Peep Show, the dreaded laugh track is present. The writing and performance are legitimately hilarious enough to keep from getting too distracted.

Between Mitchell and Webb and the Catherine Tate Show, I've recently stumbled into a cornucopia of contemporary sketch comedy. This is splendid, joyous stuff, and a good way to let out the steam after a particularly uncomfortable episode of Peep Show.

I'm not sure exactly what episode this entry pertains to. It would appear to be in series four. I will, then, talk more generally about the fourth series.

David Tennant's third year in the role is his strongest, despite a fairly tepid allotment of scripts. You have a couple of stunners toward the end; "Midnight" and the prologue to the finale, "Turn Left", are amongst the greatest scripts ever written for the show. The earlier Ood story is a bit on-the-nose, but has the right idea. Although the Pompeii story doesn't quite work, it tackles some themes never before addressed in the series -- and when it does so, it does it well. Not as well as the later "Waters of Mars", but hey.

Otherwise the series is mostly a dud, narrative-wise. Nothing as horrible as some of the series three indiscretions; more a dull murmur of mediocrity. Despite the odd flash of competence in his Sarah Jane Adventures scripts, I'll be happy if Gareth Roberts never writes for the parent show again. The Sontarans were boring villains at the best of times, and although their new adventure is superior to all of their classic ones (save perhaps the shortest and most conceptual, The Sontaran Experiment), there's little positive to say and nothing so heinous as to strain myself in detailing. It's just... there.

Yet this is also the series where Donna (Catherine Tate) comes in full-time. And it's the series where her grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) becomes a recurring feature. The two of them can battle it out off-screen for the position of greatest Doctor Who companion ever. As lukewarm as I may be toward Tennant's portrayal of the Doctor, his chemistry with each of them elevates the show to a new level and harks back to some of the best Doctor/companion pairings of the past -- Troughton and Frazer Hines, Hartnell and Ian and Barbara, McCoy and Sophie Aldred.

Donna is such a flawed, yet such a genuine character -- and she undergoes more development than any other companion figure in the show's history. Heck, she probably develops more than any other individual character. As far as the new series goes, it's refreshing to have such an unimpressed companion. Donna respects the Doctor's perspective, and he inspires her every bit as much as she inspires him, yet she is immune to his nonsense. If he needs a kick in the rear, Donna will gladly provide it. If anything, she frequently shows better judgment than Tennant's petulant, temperamental Doctor.

So although it's hard to find a standout episode in this bunch, these dynamics make any episode entertaining, whatever else may or may not be going on with the story. As it happens the overall story arc is pretty decent, and better developed than in previous series. (With that in mind, It is curious that the two best-written episodes are the ones where Tennant and Tate are largely separated.)

In some ways it's a shame that the last few episodes are so continuity-heavy, as otherwise it would be easy to point series four at the Doctor Who neophyte and say, here; this is all the David Tennant you really need to see. This, and maybe a few excerpts from previous seasons -- most of them by Steven Moffat. And "The Waters of Mars".

Oh well. Even though the production team was running out of creative steam here, the cast carries the show to an extent it hasn't since the boring scripts and amazing chemistry of 1967-1969.

Any element of this documentary could have been interesting on its own. Its problems are of organization, depth of content, and in its representation of its contents.

Cropsey sells itself as an investigation of the history behind a local tall tale or scary story -- sort of a Hook Man legend of the New York tri-state area. That could have been really neat. Instead it uses the Cropsey story as a facile metaphor for the story of a convicted child predator who roamed the site of a former mental institution in the 1970s. Again, that itself could have been a good subject. Yet instead of investigating the social circumstances and consequences of the killings -- what led to the fellow's crimes, and what effect those crimes had on the local culture -- the filmmakers spent most of their time puttering around Staten Island, conducting inconsequential searches of the institution grounds, writing questionable letters to the convict in question, and making fruitless visits to his prison.

You can tell how young the filmmakers are by the depth of their solipsism. The documentary is almost more about the fact that they're making a documentary, and the problems and logistics that they face along the way, than it is about its ostensible subject. Guys, I don't care what brick walls you ran into. None of them are even particularly interesting. And then, what, you stop and shrug the moment the convict decides not to talk to you? What about the actual content of his letters? What can we gather from that? You barely showed it.

We could also have looked at the institution itself, and the culture from which it arose. Why were the conditions so bad there? What was the justification? What promises did the staff make to families? What were the ramifications, in terms of the mental health of its patients? How are the conditions and culture of the institution related to the killer's emotional and physical circumstances? Now that you've thrown all these pieces on the board, how do they fit together?

There are at least three failed explorations in here, any of which I'd have been pleased to hear more about. The most interesting of those is the folklore angle -- as evidently the filmmakers recognized, given the documentary's spin.

I've barely nibbled on the food, so I can't say much about its quality one way or another. What I can do is tell a little story.

Based on some reviews here, I finally plunged in and took advantage of SeamlessWeb. Not the most illustrative name around; basically it's a service that lists restaurants which deliver to your area, and allows you to order online. No surcharge or anything. What's swell about this, aside from theoretically not having to bother with the phone, is the breadth of participating establishments. At any time you might see a Jamaican barbecue joint, a Japanese restaurant, two or three Indian places, a vegan sandwich shop, and several pizza places. They only show the stores that should be open, so there's little chance of confusion or fuss.

Again, in theory.

Granted the night of a blizzard was not the best night to order out. I wasn't aware of how bad it was out there, as earlier in the day the snow was rather delicate. So my wife and I found a decent-looking Indian restaurant called Bombay Heights, put in our orders, set a tip, and submitted. We immediately got a confirmation, which said to expect the food in 30-45 minutes. Okay, fine. We set to our individual tasks and waited.

An hour later, we were hungrier. My wife suggested that I call the restaurant. Nobody answered. I then called SeamlessWeb. I found myself on hold for several minutes. One of the hold messages suggested that I send an email to customer support for immediate attention. I did so, and sat around for another half an hour. Eventually I called the 1-800 number again. Finally we got through. My wife snatched up the phone and reported that it had been 90 minutes since our order, and that we couldn't contact the restaurant. The lady at SeamlessWeb tried to contact them, and also failed. She then refunded us our money, and gave us a 25% off coupon for our next SeamlessWeb transaction.

Okay, fine. We toasted up some cheese sandwiches and curled in bed with some Cap'n Crunch. My wife kept musing about how horrible she would feel if that delivery actually turned up.

After another hour, there was a buzz at the door. It was the dude from the restaurant. I opened the door, and there was a wall of snow outside. It was like I had opened a portal to Nunavut. The delivery guy was shaking and miserable. With a mind to how horrible it was out there, we tipped him another ten bucks and marveled that he managed to make the delivery at all.

In retrospect there was probably only the one guy working at the restaurant, and he had to take time out to deliver the food himself. And even then it took him hours just to make it up the block. So the food was late; okay, fine. It was still warm when we got it. And the mere fact of its delivery was kind of amazing.

In turn we called SeamlessWeb back up again, and asked that they reverse the reversal on our charge. I've no idea if this food is any good, but the guy prevailed in delivering it. We're not going to penalize him for circumstances beyond his control.

Basically the point of this review is, if nothing else you will get your order one way or another. And it will be wrapped well, and warm. Even if it means slogging an inch at a time through a hurricane of snow.

The place looks great. The reservation is actually for the 31st.

Not sure about getting too personal, but this may be relevant. I've mentioned my wife a few times. This is actually shorthand, as it's easier to type and say and less distracting for people to process. To be completely accurate, she will be my wife at the end of the month. It's a small thing; just a few people who we want to involve. And Josie's is the place we chose for our post-wedding banquet.

Again I've never been, but perhaps that puts the reservation in context. The place is trendy and pricey, and also a little bit weird, and also seems completely substantial. It's got a wide enough variety, sensitive to enough dietary concerns, to feed all our digestively broken friends. And it just seems like a nifty and celebratory place to do this thing.

I'm sure the restaurant has many other uses. Based on research, I'm trusting that it is sufficient for one of the most important dinners of my life. So hey. File that away as you will.

You can tell this is the filmmakers' first major project after film school.

I too often confuse Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera. They've got the same hair, same build, same facial expressions, and they're cast in similar roles. So it is that when the film freezes and spells out Eisenberg's personal (postmodern ironic film-hip) tips and techniques for zombie survival, the mind travels to Scott Pilgrim. Similar conceit. Not the same kid. Whereas Pilgrim takes the conceit further than sense dictates, and thereby elevates itself beyond the conceit in much the way that the mind stops processing Tarantino's violence as violence, Zombieland is content to lurk in the hipster fog beneath the glowing neon signs. So it's not transcendent, and therefore the affectations do end up feeling a little gratuitous.

But oh, I'm speaking in absolute terms here. Zombieland ain't bad. A bunch of kids wanted to make an ironic zombie movie and they got some high-profile talent involved. You've got Woody Harrelson. You've got Bill Murray. You have a script by someone who watched a little too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You have good cinematography and effects work. It's a noble effort, and it's got a good spirit to it.

You'd think the kids would know that there is no way Jesse Eisenberg's character could afford that apartment, though. Who do they think he is, Mark Zuckerberg?

David Tennant's penultimate story is probably one of the three to five best episodes since Doctor Who's revival in 2005, and just possibly one of the best since the show began in 1963. Structurally there's nothing new or particularly interesting at play. Yet "The Waters of Mars" is one of the only stories in the history of the series to take that familiar base-under-siege format and use it as a canvas for larger things.

As a sketch, "The Waters of Mars" sounds exactly like the 2007 episode "42". In "42" a small space vessel is overtaken by a living sun. One crew member after another is infected and begins to leak fire from every orifice, as the sun particles try to make their way back home. In "The Waters of Mars" a small Mars base is overtaken by a sort of intelligent water. One after another, the crew members get infected and begin to drip water from every orifice as the water tries to make its way to Earth.

"42" is content to assume that its premise is interesting in and of itself -- as if none of us have seen The Thing, Night of the Living Dead, or fully 75% of the classic series of Doctor Who. The episode relishes in the familiar, not only retreading the format for its own sake but filling its empty spaces with pop culture references. The writer tossed in a trivia machine as a plot device, hoping to involve and distract the audience with $200 Jeopardy questions in place of genuine character or thematic development. Even the title is a reference to a certain US drama series. The episode takes place over 42 minutes, you see.

By comparison, "The Waters of Mars" hardly cares about the monsters, or the threat, or the fact that the crew members are getting picked off like so many randy babysitters. Oh, it takes the material seriously; it has to be amongst the scariest episodes of Who ever produced, and at times approaches a flat-out horror show like Supernatural. The tone is stark and somber, and -- given that it's set on Mars, about 50 years in the future -- fairly realistic. Characters act rationally, and use all the tools and information available to them. Relationships and emotions are understated yet clear. Yet the episode isn't about any of that. Rather, it's about what all of that means.

There are a few things going on here, all intertwined. The events on the Mars base are important not just because they're happening and we're watching them; they're important because, as established right up front, this is a critical moment in time. Within the first five minutes we know what's supposed to happen, and we know that it will happen. The action, therefore, plays out as a tragedy. Since we know how these plots work, the next hour is consciously about seeing how the inevitable plays out, and growing to appreciate the characters' vain, yet so very noble, struggles against their fate.

And then there's the Doctor. For a show about time travel, Doctor Who is very seldom about time travel. Even less often does it address not just the logistical but the ethical and practical consequences of time travel. Here, for much of the episode the Doctor is as much a spectator as the audience. He has stumbled into a historical event, and however horrible it may be he knows what will happen if he interferes. The events then also become a catalyst for serious character work, as the Doctor struggles against his own impulses, wobbling between curiosity and guilt; self-respect and impotence. Ultimately, it's a matter of pride. The Doctor never walks away from other people's problems; he only walks away from his own. That's the only way he can live with himself. And he lived for so many years.

Eventually the Doctor makes his decisions, and he reaps the consequences. And in the last few minutes the episode transcends probably everything else ever done with the show.

"The Waters of Mars" is about responsibility -- big decisions with big, real consequences. In this case those decisions happen to involve monsters in a space base. You could plug in any threat, any plot; as well-told as it is here, it's all beside the point. The Doctor isn't the only character whose decisions matter, either; everyone makes his or her choices, and they all do the best they can under the circumstances. But when you get into something as complicated as time travel, and you think there are any easy answers, you're one step away from becoming the problem yourself.

Two things now stand out to me about Toy Story. Although it comes from 1995 — just two years after Jurassic Park, four years after Terminator 2, and the same year that the original PlayStation and Sega Saturn hit the shelves, ushering in the first wave of mainstream 3D game hardware — the movie still looks and feels current.

The goal was never photo-realism; the animators set certain stylistic boundaries and worked within them. So with the exception of a few organic characters — the boys, the dogs — the animation holds up perfectly well. And since the movie isn’t so much about toys or contemporary culture as it is about self-awareness and change, its story only grows more effective as one ages and comes to appreciate all the levels of Buzz and Woody’s emotional problems.

The only other comment I’ve got right now is about Pixar’s weird form of social commentary. Time and again the writers play nonhuman characters against humanity. Pixar’s humans are callous as a rule, oblivious at best, and at worst a malevolent force. They take the form, I suppose, of your typical Greek gods. Familiar human characteristics are instead assigned to non-human characters — toys, animals, robots, creatures.

You see it in the Toy Story movies, where humans are revered as gods and devils. You see it in Finding Nemo, where they’re a natural force like the wind and rain. Wall-E is all about working against Man’s callous nature. Monsters, Inc comes from another angle and positions them as a natural resource.

So thematically, Toy Story is the template for nearly every Pixar movie to follow. Yet somehow, going back to it after all these years, it avoids feeling generic or overly familiar. I guess that’s the talent at show over there in Alameda. Pixar may have a standard formula, but they put in enough detail and nuance that each product stands as an original, genuine story. That’s some good craft, there.

Well, second time's the charm. After the BBC finally strangled the life out of the show in 1989, it quickly turned into a merchandise machine the likes of which the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, had never seen. It was a weird situation. Internally the BBC couldn't stand the show. They were embarrassed to be associated with it, and spent most of the 1980s passively trying to kill it off. And yet, it was perhaps their most well-known and by a huge margin their most profitable property -- a property that only ballooned once it was no longer on the air and so produced a cottage industry to fill the demand. Books, comics, audio dramas -- there was more Doctor Who produced during the 1990s than had been in the previous three decades combined; it's just, none of it was on TV.

None except the 1996 TV movie. That was a weird one. Seven years later, an independent producer got the rights to the series and brokered a deal with Universal and Fox to shoot a backdoor pilot for a potential US continuation of the show. It looked amazing, had a great cast, and had an enormous budget -- but the script sucked and it aired on Fox, which is never a route to a full and healthy life. So the pilot failed, and the show went back into the storeroom for another seven years.

Funny thing is, the TV movie injected a whole new life into, and provided a focal point for, all the spin-off fiction. Although the show was still in limbo, it was alive again and gaining momentum. The new Doctor and new scenario provided a blank slate for the novel and audio ranges. The comic strip entered an amazing era; mostly a single author and single artist, the Eighth Doctor strips are perhaps the best Doctor Who ever produced for any medium. This was an era of renewed enthusiasm, where fan writers could make the show their own and become professional authors all at the same time. Furthermore, in anticipation for the Fox series the BBC took much of its merchandising back in-house -- where clearly a few gears began to turn. All of this new Doctor Who branded stuff, it was published by the BBC again. And boy, was it a hunk of their market.

So by the time of the show's 40th anniversary, the internal climate was rather different. There were people in powerful positions who saw the demand, and who saw a gap in the BBC's output that the show could fill again. The only problem was doing it right -- giving the show enough of a budget and hiring the right talent so that it came back strong, as a serious if light-hearted drama rather than a self-reflexive satire.

And yeah. Add a year and a half for production, and the 2005 revival is the show that Doctor Who always was yet never quite lived up to. In place of the convoluted swamp of exposition that was the 1996 revival, writer and producer Russell T Davies wiped the slate clean. Oh, the continuity was there. We started fresh with the Ninth Doctor, and all that had happened had happened. It's just that much more had happened than we knew. Between the old series and new were big, world-changing events -- unseen, only hinted at as myth or legend. Both new and old viewers were on the same level, baffled and intrigued with a mysterious past that blurs all continuity into a couple of broad strokes, both doing away with the clutter and romanticizing it as background. Ultimately all that matters is the premise, and what's happening here and now. In turn, Doctor Who has never been more present than the revived series.

Still today, after another four and a half series and two further Doctors, the 2005 series stands as probably the best and bravest individual season in the show's history. Every single episode is important (even the tedious "Unquiet Dead"), and nearly every beat of every story introduces something new, that it's bewildering to think that the show never did before. Whatever you think of his Doctor as a whole, Christopher Eccleston is the best actor ever to hold the title role, and his take on the character is striking for its originality. Likewise, Billie Piper was an inspired find. At least during this first series she embodies her character Rose with such a dedication that it's hard to believe she's acting the part.

Anyone looking to dive into Doctor Who, this is the best and least complicated place to do it. The 2010 series is also solid; it's another semi-reboot, or at least clearing of the decks, and current Doctor Matt Smith is also one of the show's stronger leads. What it's missing is the strength and conviction and, frankly, balls of the 2005 revival. The pilot episode is a bit of a toss-up; some good bits, bewilderingly bad CG effects work, and some weird creative decisions. If the second episode doesn't drive things home, then the intro to episode four will. If not that, then episode six will burrow into your head. By the final six episodes, the show will be yours and you will belong to the show.

The Creature from the Pit comes from the same season as The Horns of Nimon, the story often cited as the absolute and bewildering nadir of the classic series -- and alternatively regarded as a sort of a comic triumph. They've got the same budget problems here, and although Douglas Adams was in charge of the creative side of things, in 1979 he was very distracted by the sudden success of his own Hitchhiker's Guide. So again this is the season where no one was really minding the store.

However, Creature from the Pit was, I believe, the first story to go into production -- so things weren't quite as weird as they would become. They had a little money to spend unwisely, and Adams clearly did bother to polish some of the dialog. What should be a tedious and unambitious runaround becomes rather droll -- and then thanks to some miscommunications within the effects department, comes out the other end into what-the-hell territory.

The bulk of that budget I mentioned went into constructing an enormous, pulsating green phallus named Erato. It's difficult to see it as anything else. Scrotum and all. Tom Baker tries his best to look frightened as he scurries down a hallway, chased by a huge, swinging dong. Later he attempts to communicate with Erato by clutching its extremity and blowing into the tip.

Somehow I think this set a precedent for his behavior all season.

There's a hilarious documentary on board about the unfortunate decisions that went into Erato's construction, and everyone's reactions when they realized what they had built. I'm glad that nobody makes the slightest effort to take this story seriously.

Fun note: the technician inside Erato was in fact a woman.

I don't know. I guess if you're going to watch Tom Baker era Who, this is fairly representative.

Although I adore her character in Doctor Who, I was unaware of just what a good actress Catherine Tate is. This is some of my favorite sketch comedy I've seen in ages. The best part is the unexpected subtlety, both to Tate's character observation and performance and to the humor itself. Every sketch is a droll little observation about a character type or a life scenario, most of them dreadfully inane yet seldom addressed. Each only lasts for a few moments -- just long enough to explore the point -- then moves on.

As I said, the most startling thing is Tate's performance. In each episode she plays at least half a dozen completely different characters -- different accent, different speech patterns and mannerisms, different posture -- and she totally, believably embodies each of them. A few characters recur from episode to episode as the material presents itself, but each episode has its share of original voices.

I was unsure what to expect, as I so often hear such strong invective about the show, but based on the first few episodes, I suggest it unreservedly.

Underworld is a plodding mid-era Tom Baker four-parter by the writing team who dreamed up the Doctor's robotic dog K-9, Bob Baker and Dave Martin. The common line is that the story fails because the special effects look awful, the sets look cheap, and the story displays an unfortunate amount of humor. If there's a redeeming feature, people say, it's that the story is drowning in references to classical mythology and therefore can pretend to be educated.

Indeed the story is a bit of a failure, but I'd say that largely rests in Baker and Martin's decision to truss up Jason and the Argonauts with some sci-fi trappings instead of taking a simple idea -- such as the regeneration pods that have kept the crew alive for 100,000 years -- and extrapolating it. For a small crew that has lived longer than most human civilizations, they all seem oddly... normal. We're introduced to plot devices like a ray that makes people docile, and then the story never explains or explores them -- what part they play in life, what their ramifications or consequences might be. Instead, we have an ancient plot to churn through and familiar symbols to quote so that the educated yet unimaginative can feel they got their license fee's worth. Every time the story checks another box, I feel my eyes roll back into my head. Oh, look! The golden fleece! Sort of!

The serial has its points of interest, though -- most notably those unconvincing special effects. By the time the story went into production, the ferocious continual inflation of the pound meant the budget was devalued and they no longer had money for sets. Cue ingenuity; for one of the first times ever, the story was substantially shot against bluescreen, with the actors layered on top of scale models.

The effect rarely fools the eye, but so what. This is ingenious stuff, here. Decades before George Lucas shot his Star Wars prequels almost entirely against blue curtains, we get a prototype of the same idea -- and done reasonably well, under the circumstances. We do have depth, and layers. Actors walk out from behind matted bits of the scenery, and then around to the front again. Someone meticulously planned their walk paths, and lined up real surfaces whenever the actors needed to touch something. The effect is a bit like those sections in Final Fantasy VII where you've got polygonal characters running around on top of a bitmapped picture. You know the elements don't fit, but it works well enough to get the message across.

So that's kind of neat. The modelwork and much of the acting is rather nice as well, at least considering what they were given. Tom Baker straddles the line between reading the lines as written and doing his own personal comedy routine, as he would later devolve into. You can tell he's bored, but I think he has every right to be. His small larks do inject a bit of life into the dust, helping to carry the attention through.

Underworld is probably amongst the least necessary Who serials ever, but it's no no means horrible. Tedious in some respects; technically interesting in some others. It's just so very nothing. I always forget which story this is, and almost immediately after watching it I forget again.

In retrospect people describe season 20 of Doctor Who as a huge flashback. They make pains to point out how every story features a returning character from the show's history. In reality I only think two or three reappearances are worth noting. You've got the Black Guardian back for a three-serial arc, for the first time in four years. That counts as one, so far as I'm concerned. Then you've got Omega back from the 10th anniversary special, to lead off the season. That one's pretty overt. And finally the season ends with The Five Doctors, which is sort of a menagerie of all the show's history.

Other serials are a little more dubious. In one story we have the long-awaited return of a villain introduced just the previous season. And then we have The King's Demons. Considering that the Master has been a semi-regular feature of the show since his reintroduction in season 18, and will continue to appear about once a season throughout the 1980s, I don't see how he alone counts as a blast from the past. It's more like business as usual, really.

I think I'm prevaricating to avoid the actual topic of this review. It's not that there's anything specially wrong with The King's Demons. It's more that there's very little of note about it. It's a short, two-episode pseudo-historical that seems to drag on for twice its length. The TARDIS crew touches down in medieval England, for no particular reason. They exit the ship into the middle of a jousting match, overseen by the figure of King John himself, on his way to sign the Magna Carta.

If this were a David Whitaker script, maybe we'd be onto something -- a sensitive exploration of a cultural context that we tend to blur into stereotype. Indeed some of the disc's special features adequately explain the situation that birthed the Magna Carta, and dwell on the daily lives of the various factions involved in the treaty. This is good stuff, and might well have been the focus of the story.

Instead, as in Terence Dudley's earlier Black Orchid, the characters mostly stand, occasionally skulk, around and avoid talking about anything in particular, expressing any opinions or perspectives, or accomplishing much of anything. If you like, here's the full story: our heroes get alternately accused and praised for various things not of their doing, and then one of the characters is revealed as the Master. The Master accuses our heroes of various things not of their doing, and then another of the characters is revealed as a shape-shifting android. Our heroes lock the Master in his TARDIS (I think) and then leave, the android in tow. The end.

This android is of course Kamelion, an ineffectual prop that the writers promptly forget about until they choose to kill him off about a season later, in Planet of Fire. The only comment I can offer is that their eventual solution to the Kamelion problem -- substituting a man with silver face paint for the original prop -- was actually rather elegant, and that if they had hit on that idea earlier they could easily have used Kamelion as a regular character. In that sense he was perhaps a bold missed opportunity. Given his actual on-screen use, however, the widespread tendency amongst those even aware of the character is to consciously forget that Kamelion even existed.

Given that the Kamelion's introduction is perhaps the only memorable detail of The King's Demons, you can see my hesitancy to get to the point. I guess the point is simple enough, though. You're safe in skipping this one.

The DVD is fairly solid, though. As I said, the special features add wealth to a dreary production. The commentary, led by Peter Davison, is jovial as ever. The actual serial is also beautifully restored. I'm used to this serial looking like blurry, over-exposed mud. As tedious as it may be, at least now there's plenty of production detail to distract the eye.

Run for Your Life is a documentary of two halves, one more interesting and less developed than the other. It begins as a story of the New York City Marathon -- how it came about, how its growth affected the city and paralleled other social movements of the early 1970s, and how it grew into the cultural monolith that we know today. Then somewhere around the half-hour mark, the film meanders into the personal life of marathon founder Fred Lebow.

Lewbow is a fascinating guy in his own right; he never knew how to have a personal life, and so he just kept running -- both metaphorically and literally. There was always something new, somewhere new, someone new to chase after. The only thing that he never ran from was an idea. He was a brilliant guy, able to see to the center of complex problems and successfully argue for a solution before the problems were even on the radar of most people. More than brilliant, he was faithful to his ideas and principles to an extent that few people are. He came off as crazy, arrogant, and then visionary.

So his story is interesting, and rather inspirational, just on the basis of his personality. Yet that story fairly well consumes the latter two-thirds of the movie, leaving several intriguing questions about the marathon itself to dangle in the wind. The film toys with the social effects of the marathon on the city, both in terms of its general reputation and in the practical effects on specific neighborhoods. Were the effects permanent? How did the residents of those neighborhoods feel? Are there any statistics on crime and demographics, or any representative anecdotes about the change in tone?

How did the route evolve over time? Why has it stayed the same basic shape since the start? Has it come into any criticism? If the marathon grew out of a Bronx running club, why is the route based mostly in Brooklyn, with only a few minutes each in the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens?

How has the public perception of running changed? The documentary states that back in the early '70s no one thought of running as a serious sport. Let's have some more details about the changes -- some milestone moments that mark its cultural evolution. It also says that back then, running was all about going fast. So how has the science changed, and how has the marathon tied into that? Back then, some experts advised that women should never run more than a mile. Explain that, and explain some of the adversity that women had to face before the cultural and scientific mainstream accepted them as athletes. Lebow is supposed to have been a major catalyst in addressing all of this, so great. Address it.

The editing is dynamic and clear, which helps to power through exciting sequences like the history that makes up the first half-hour. When the film slows down to dwell on Lebow's life, the constant cutting and animation begins to feel overly busy and distracting, making the slow portions feel all the slower.

The film gives a fair glimpse at a remarkable mind that thrived off of and in turn enriched a remarkable cultural context. For my money I want a little more of that context in the mix.