What Are You Currently Watching (on tv/dvd)?

[Ian]

1990.



Though, given that it was axed last year (about eight years overdue, if you ask me), they'd ALL be old ones now.

[Ian]

Buffy season 1. Always a bit weird when you go back to the very start of a series, but I'm well and truly getting back into it again now. The Pack is an awesome episode - taking a potentially very silly premise and turning it into something genuinely creepy. Nick Brendon does a great job turning the possessed Xander from our loveable goodhearted doofus everyman into someone cruel and frightening.

[Ian]

Buffy: The Puppet Show. Another 1st season classic, and still one of the funniest Buffy episodes, this is a deliciously ridiculous story with too many hilarious moments to count, though Xander, Giles and Willow's reaction to the dummy vanishing and Snyder's bemused reaction to the surreal/gruesome tableau on the stage at the end have to be rate high. "I don't get it.... What's it supposed to be, avant garde?" Sid the Dummy is a priceless creation.

I'm also nostalgically fond of this ep as this was the one where I realised I was no longer just watching this show, but had become a huge fan of it.

[fish]

Buffy is really a puppet??


I always suspected as much.

[Ian]

Doctor Who - The Androids of Tara. An enormously fun fairytaleesque romantic swashbuckler, full of great lines, Tom on fab form, a great villain in Peter Jeffrey's charming but utterly swineish Count Grendel, and a cracking climactic sword fight. What more do you want?

[katka]

Arn: The Knight Templar / Arn - Tempelriddaren - starting with Joakim Nätterqvist Very good movie and Joakim was excellent

[Ian]

Started Life on Mars season 1. Terrific.

[Ian]

Buffy: School Hard. This classic episode sees the introduction of the badass vampire Spike (and Drusilla) to the series.

BUFFY: Do we really need weapons for this?

SPIKE: I just like them.... they make me feel all manly.

[fish]

What's life if you can't go out and shoot something?

[Ian]

Sons and Daughters. What an awesome episode. Poor Wayne comes home and finds himself in an episode of The Twilight Zone, with friends and family accusing him of doing all these terrible things when he hasn't even been there for a month. And to top it off, he then manages to get himself shot by a terrified woman who think he's his own imposter come back to attack her again!

Completely barking but brilliant TV.

[Ian]

Buffy: Lie to Me. This is a dark but excellent episode with an old friend who betrays Buffy because he wants to become a vampire... as he's dying of brain cancer. Dark stuff.

[fish]

Buffy is really a puppet?? ...

No, sorry.
All Buffy's mystique has gone for me now.

[Ian]

Doctor Who - The Armageddon Factor. Overlong but entertaining conclusion to the Key To Time season. I particularly like Drax, the rogue Time Lord who talks and acts like a Cockney wideboy straight out of an episode of Minder.

[Ian]

Sherlock - A Scandal in Belgravia. Great start to the new season. Looking forward to their take on Hound of the Baskervilles this week, which looks well warped.

[Ian]

Buffy: Innocence. The pivotal and dramatic episode where the curse that gave Angel his soul back lifts it again - and he instantly reverts to the evil and sadistic Angelus. The scene in the school corridor at night when he comes to visit the utterly oblivious Willow and Xander is VERY scary. The ep also features one of the show's most iconic action scenes where Buffy shows the "unkillable" demon The Judge that weaponry has moved on since the Middle Ages... by taking him out with a rocket launcher.

"What does THAT do?"