By Roy Mathur, on 2024-12-23, at 23:28:12 to 23:55:01 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Christmas preparations are awfully close to the wire this year. I panicked recently when I realised the date and did the Christmas shop in a rush. And then again in succeeding days, ending with the last exhausting shop just a few minutes ago.
Again, this isn't the revisit you might have been expecting because the last post-sickness podcast left me thoroughly buggered, though I am improving. Content this time is mostly, but not exclusively SFFH because what I said before was, "more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."
PS If this episode sounds different, it's because I'm using the Shure SM58 mic, instead of the usual Shure SM7B.
In this 2024 BBC iPlayer sci-fi, a teacher hears something only one of her pupils and a group of mystical weirdos can hear, then her life unravels badly.
Reminiscent of 70s New Wave, which I like, with a similarly characteristically miserable denouement, which I don't.
German 2024 Netflix sci-fi series, with some occasionally wonky acting, that strings us along about an astronaut's alien contact, then ends weakly without a third encounter.
The finale has ended and it's been a claustrophobic slog so far. I'll watch until the mystery of the Emperor's Bashar and first Sardaukar is solved. (I maintain, he's a robot; a walking microwave oven).
I'm still transfixed by Ferguson, though I sympathise with Steve Zahn's survival instinct because, "the needs of the one..." Sometimes.
I'm still watching because it's fluff temporarily switches off my tortured brain and how could I not enjoy the silly space pirateyness of it?
An ITV X rewatch made me behold the magnificent absurdity of Olga Kurylenko brownface in Quantum and I finally understood Daniel Craig's Bond's suicidal spiral since Casino Royale, culminating in the No Time's terminal kablooey. Why does a mature special forces commander get PTSD from murder? I'd understand it after Vesper in Casino, but not before. Bold, but depressing path for the blonde Bond, and one that doesn't tally with Fleming's novels.
In the past, I had been scornful of Craig's whinging about playing Bond, but had he not left we'd have never got Benoit Blanc.
Netflix 2024: spy, Keira Knightley's boyfriend is killed in conspiracy to cover up murder of Chinese diplomat, so she goes on the rampage, teaming up with old pal, Ben Whishaw, an assassin.
Spooks-lite, though lightly-built Knightley and Whishaw are surprisingly not bad at kicking bottom. But if she's undercover, why does she have an arsenal in her wardrobe and car?
The revisits are hard to make, and sickness didn't help, so I'm not going to make my end of year deadline to finish revisiting classic Doctor Who. Sorry.
On the other hand, to save you wading through the morass, earlier this year, I celebrated Doctor Who Day by secretly launching two new special one-off podcasts from revisit episodes extracted from my main feed.
Why the unhyphenated "wizard" prefix? Because it's a colloquial superlative adjective from an age that launched futuristic art deco architecture that led to slipstream moderne cool, the slick fashion of flappers and sheiks, my favourite musical instrument; the banjolele, and as a noun because I'm increasingly looking like one. The moment I shave or trim my beard, I swear the next day it's down to my knees and my post-COVID hair is down my back too. I used to mock men who looked like that by calling them "Gandalf". I'm the Gandalf now.