By Roy Mathur, on 2026-02-02, at 23:54:33 to 00:44:39 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
My finger's recovering, but unbelievably, Mum whacked the same finger on the opposite hand on a can, and so I had to reciprocate her earlier rescue of me.
NB This is the second taping (rumbling handling noise ruined the first), using a Shure SM58 mic plugged into a Sony PCM M10 recorder mounted on a desk stand.
As season two draws to a close, Tom Hiddlestone's hotel night shift manager's quest to bring down his nemesis, arms dealer Dickie Roper, goes badly wrong in the jungle.
Fancy weapons tech, a dastardly villain, double crosses and assassinations galore, let's hope ex-James Bond candidate, Hiddlestone, doesn't do a No Time to Die before sending Dickie to hell next season.
Respect to the creators for sticking with such an unGoogleable and unSEO-friendly title. This Warner et al on Lifetime dark romance 2018--2023 was a minor hit that exploded when it moved to Netflix. I followed the first two of five seasons, put it on hold for years, then boxsetted all 5 seasons over the last week.
It is the unsettling, yet compelling, chronicles of affable bookseller and serial stalker Joe (Penn Badgley, also Gossip Girl's Dan Humphrey) on his bloody path to true love. Joe would, no doubt, be cling-filmed to Dexter's kill table in a crossover. Though the adventures become more wildly improbable each season, I was particularly taken with the atmospheric voiceover by Badgley; a voice actor since childhood.
Like the ending of Dexter: Resurrection (pod 594), though pre-dating it, there's a similar snide, presumptuous remark to camera criticising the audience's enjoyment. The forth season has Joe dissociating from reality and the final season reveals his maniacal, misogynistic psychopathy with no chance of redemption. It's a sad and unenviable spiral to hell.
This is so 50s American high school, with jocks, spirit rallies, and debating teams. It's like the future never happened and we all still live on Planet America c. 1950. Honestly, I'd rather rewatch Grease, which at least has the distinction of being about greasers.
Here we go again with yet another attempt to reboot B7. This time by director, Peter Hoar (Doctor Who; A Good Man Goes to War, The Robot Revolution, Lucky Day, and Daredevil, It's a Sin, and The Last of Us), executive producer of A Good Girl's Guide To Murder, Matthew Bouch, and Big Finish, etc. audio producer, Jason Haigh-Ellery. They have opened a "genre-based" indie production company called Multitude Productions and have bought Blake's 7 IP. Hoar's been in Whovian news because of what he said about Ncuti's Who, "I think there were lots of areas you could point fingers at but ultimately it wasn't a better show with more money". (Max Goldbart, Deadline, 2026-01-19 01:00). I've been around too long not to think this meaningless dissection was a transparent attempt to bait the media, then get the chance to blah on about the new production company. Or am I being too cynical?
As a fan of the original---running home to watch, buying the magazines, plastering posters to my bedroom, and buying the VHSs---I have talked about a possible reboot of B7 many times in this pod. I remember SyFy responding to my enquiries about it, but that came to nothing. I would have liked to have seen Blake's 7 back when at least some of the key main cast were still alive, but now? I don't know. Cowboy nut Paul Darrow once even said, the reboot's already been done, it was called Firefly.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot has a lot to answer for by encouraging the incessant retreading of old IP, but I think B7's day has been and gone. Like New BSG did with insurgency, fanaticism, and terrorism, New B7 could be spun for the modern zeitgeist. We're 80% to 24/7 surveillance and state authoritarianism and repression, which were central to the core of the B7's Star Trek Federation gone wrong and warped into the fascist imperialism of Servalan and her black-clad bootboys' Federation. But Blake's 7 was socialist Terry Nation's projection of where Thatcherite Britain would end up, so it's deeply entrenched in the 80s.
If anything comes to fruition, I'll watch it, but I'm not too excited as we've been here before. If it doesn't happen or make the grade, I'll appreciate it the same way I appreciate New BSG, New Who, or New Trek (including Starfleet Academy). Then I'll do what I always do. Leave it to the new fans and revisit the classic.