#oneaday Day 127: What You Leave Behind

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve made it through all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at last, and I’m pleased to report that it was fantastic. A consistently excellent show from start to finish, and a real demonstration of why ’90s Trek is so fondly regarded to this day.

I should probably add at this point that there may be spoilers ahead. I have somehow managed to go this long without having any of the latter part of Deep Space Nine (which I hadn’t seen prior to this watchthrough) being spoiled to me, so on the offchance there’s anyone in the world still left in that position, I thought I’d give you due warning. After this image of Doctor Bashir and Garak smouldering with unresolved sexual tension, anything goes discussion-wise.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Star Trek is that it strikes a good balance between being convincingly “sciencey” and having quasi-mystical elements. That’s the kind of sci-fi I like: where there’s a high level of technology and cool spaceships, but also where there’s still stuff that science can’t quite explain, or which feels like it drifts somewhat into the realm of fantasy. As someone who enjoys nothing more than an RPG where you kill God (or equivalent) at the end, I always have time for pseudo-mystical fantasy, even in a sci-fi setting; in fact, I tend to find that particularly “hard” sci-fi — that is to say, sci-fi that paints an overly practical, “realistic” image of the future without any overtly fantastical stuff, is a bit of a turn-off.

Deep Space Nine had this right from its very first episode, where leading character Ben Sisko encounters “The Prophets”, aka the noncorporeal entities that live outside of linear time inside the Bajoran wormhole. And this element runs as a constant thread through the entire series, right up until its climactic confrontation, placing Ben Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets, up against his most fearsome foe: the Emissary of the Pah-wraiths, who, of course, turns out to be Gul Dukat.

Gul Dukat is a thoroughly interesting character throughout the entirety of Deep Space Nine, and played brilliantly by Marc Alaimo. Beginning as a somewhat smarmy individual that is clearly bitter about the Federation occupying the space station he used to be in charge of, the episodes that involve him reveal a character with a considerable amount of depth and complexity — and one who goes through almost as much shit as Miles O’Brien. Sadly for Dukat, he doesn’t pull through in the way O’Brien tends to; his eventual fate is unglamorous, but for him to be the “final boss” of the series, defeated by Sisko flinging himself into the fire with a Pah-wraith-possessed Dukat in tow, is entirely appropriate.

The whole Dominion War arc, which takes up a significant portion of Deep Space Nine’s complete runtime, is kept consistently interesting by allowing us to see it from a variety of different perspectives. Even the Dominion’s grunt soldiers, the Jem’Hadar, are given some complexity through episodes such as “Hippocratic Oath” and “Rocks and Shoals”. And the sinister twist of Section 31, while relegated somewhat to background lore, provides a good means of giving the Federation a bit of interest, too.

One of the things Deep Space Nine shows repeatedly is that even the forces we have previously been led to believe are the “goodies” have their dark sides — and likewise, traditional “baddies” can have solid redemption arcs, too. The narrative arc of Dumar, set up to be a character the audience is supposed to loathe when he kills Dukat’s daughter Ziyal — one of the few indisputably “good” characters in the series — is thoroughly fascinating, with his descent into alcoholism and bitterness and his emergence on the other side with a new-found determination to cast off the shackles of the Dominion’s oppression. It’s fitting that he die a martyr.

Kai Winn is another character who I was pleased to see eventually get their comeuppance. I wasn’t sure if they were going to go full-on “Evil Space Pope” with her during the finale, but it is, again, entirely fitting that she have all the power and glory denied to her at the last minute as Dukat steals the show. She was a consistently loathsome character throughout her entire run in the series, so seeing her fall to evil out of her lust for power and end up incinerated for it was thoroughly satisfying.

It’s kind of sad that the end of the series marked so many “farewells” from the regular cast, but it makes sense; Deep Space Nine was not the kind of Star Trek that would necessarily lend itself well to a movie in the same way as The Next Generation was, and so it felt appropriate for most people to go their separate ways at the conclusion. I was surprised at the inconclusive fate of Sisko himself — I was expecting him to pop back into existence, Q-style, towards the end of the episode — but again, with the buildup of him being part Prophet throughout the latter seasons, it made sense for him to at least temporarily be “at one with them”, if not actually dead.

Anyway, I’m relieved, as finishing Deep Space Nine now means I feel like I can engage with Trek media produced since that series finished. The Dominion War was such an important event in Star Trek canon that I had always been hesitant to engage with anything post-Deep Space Nine for fear of inadvertently spoiling myself, but now I feel like I’m free to explore the wider Trek universe, be that through other series or video games. And there are a fair few Trek video games I’m interested in trying.

That said, I do kind of want to see how Voyager goes for its whole run. That’s another one I haven’t seen all the way through, so as far as my Star Trek journeys go, that one might well be next on the list.

Later, though. We’re off on holiday on Monday, and I wanted to finish Deep Space Nine before then, as it would have been frustrating to have just a couple of episodes left and no means of watching them while we were away! Now I just need to finish Silent Hill 2 before the end of tomorrow and I can go away with no regrets…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 96: Lower Decks

I was resistant to the idea of watching Star Trek: Lower Decks for quite some time. I was put off by a combination of some truly terrible trailers, the fairly generic-looking “adult animation” art style it uses, and the fact that its creator had some involvement in Rick and Morty, a show I couldn’t even make it through the first episode of without feeling mildly ill.

But then I got thinking: I fucking hate it when people write stuff off based on superficial things like art style, so I should endeavour to not do that either. And, discovering that the complete run of Star Trek: Lower Decks to date appears to be on Prime Video, I decided to watch an episode or two, just to see what it was like.

And you know what? It’s all right. The first couple of episodes are a bit heavy on the Gen Z-baiting manic energy, but after that it settles down a bit and starts to be a lot more witty and fun. There’s still a certain amount of that 2024 “energy” to it, which I’m sure will turn some people off, but it’s by no means a tedious Seth McFarlane-alike show. In fact, despite having a very different tone to live-action Star Trek, it actually manages to do quite a good job of feeling plausibly like what a comedy set in the Star Trek universe would feel like.

Because that’s what it is. It still has many of the elements of classic Trek: characters with a bit of depth to them; relationships that come to light over the course of several episodes; creative takes on alien races; and, of course, the all-important technobabble. It just has a rather more overtly irreverent tone than live-action Trek; this isn’t to say that live-action Trek was never funny, but rather it tended to be a more gentle, subtle sort of humour, whereas Lower Decks is rather more self-conscious about it.

Of the episodes I’ve watched so far, I think my favourite has been the third one, Temporal Edict, which is a funny take on something my wife and I discuss rather frequently: the amount of time wasted in an average day at a full-time job.

The episode concerns the captain becoming aware of the crew’s use of “buffer time”, a concept where they tell a superior that a particular job will take much longer than it will actually take, allowing them to look like a “hero” when they complete it in a fraction of the time they said they would, and also affording them time to slack off without anyone noticing. The episode explores the disastrous situation that would arise if everyone was well and truly “on the clock” at all hours of the day, and how it would almost certainly be counterproductive to try and micromanage people to this degree. It was a clever episode that, like classic Trek, takes a look at a real-life concept through the lens of sci-fi and invites us to have a good old think about it.

In short, I’m rather impressed with Lower Decks so far, and am pretty sure I’ll watch it all the way through on Prime Video at the very least and perhaps even pick up the series on disc to keep. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not it wears out its welcome by the end of five 10-episode seasons, but everything I’ve heard from people who are already fans seem to suggest that it only gets better from hereon. I’m certainly willing to give it the chance to prove itself further.

#oneaday Day 92: The Dominion War

I have watched so many episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over the course of the last few days. I can’t remember the last time I was quite so hooked on a TV show to the exclusion of almost everything else — even gaming — but Deep Space Nine definitely has its hooks in deep.

Of course, part of the reason I’ve been able to enjoy so many episodes over the course of the last few days is because I’ve had a couple of days off work. Andie was having a long weekend away with some online friends, so I decided to take a couple of days off to just decompress and unwind also. And it turns out enjoying some quality TV and mostly staying away from the Internet has been exactly what I wanted and needed.

I’m currently on the third disc of season 6 of Deep Space Nine — yes, I’m doing this old-school, on DVD (not quite as old-school as when I was first watching the show on VHS, mind!) — and I think I’m into stuff I haven’t seen before. I say “I think” because the episode I just watched seemed quite familiar — or perhaps it’s just because it reminded me of another episode. I can’t be quite sure. I’m fairly convinced that I haven’t seen beyond season 5 before, but… well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. I’m enjoying it either way.

It saddens me a bit that TV isn’t made like this any more. Sure, there are Netflix series and what have you, but those are shot and budgeted in a completely different way, and it leads to quite a different feel. It’s rare for a new streaming show to last more than a couple of seasons, and some folks describe them as “8 hour movies”. One of the reasons Deep Space Nine in particular works so well is that while it is serialised and has definite arcs — particularly at this point in its run — it also isn’t afraid to spend an episode on just being a character piece, or doing something a bit weird.

This is good for the mood and helps the show feel varied. The Dominion War overarching storyline could easily have just gone unrelentingly bleak and worked well, but I feel it works even better with interludes like Worf and Dax’s wedding, or Kira dealing with the Mirror Universe counterpart of her deceased lover, or Julian contending with genetically modified humans who didn’t end up quite as well-adjusted as him.

I’m looking forward to seeing how some aspects of the series end up. Gul Dukat being utterly broken by the death of his daughter was without a doubt an incredibly significant moment for the series, so I’m looking forward to see what happens with him from there. And of course, there’s still plenty to resolve with Sisko that I suspect will continue right up until the very end.

It’s easy to see why this is such a well regarded series, and one which many people consider Star Trek’s absolute peak. I do find it quite funny that when it first started airing, some people considered it “the boring one”, though, and many of those folks didn’t come around until season 4. Part of the show’s strength is that slow build; while I’m sure it could have told a similar story over far fewer episodes, it wouldn’t be the same show without us just having the opportunity to live with these characters for so long.

I suspect I will cry at the finale, whatever form that takes. I have remained unspoiled on that for many years now, though, so I’m looking forward to finally experiencing it for the first time when I do eventually get that far.

Should probably sleep now, though. Or maybe one more episode…?

#oneaday Day 73: Stylised TV

One of the things that I’m finding most striking about watching through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is how the show is, on the whole, willing to experiment with structure, presentation and the entire way an episode’s story is told. I don’t know if it’s just that I haven’t watched a really good TV show for a long while or if things really were a lot more ambitious in this regard in the ’90s; either way, I’ve found it very striking.

There are several episodes that defy the conventions of what I think of as “regular TV” — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say what I perceive as the “norms” of the show. The first of these that springs to mind is the early fourth season episode The Visitor, which is frequently held up as an example of the show at its absolute best. And interestingly, it’s an episode of the show where it’s at its least “sci-fi”, outside of one significant aspect.

Spoilers ahead, though this episode is nearly thirty years old at this point, so I’m going to assume most of you reading this who might be interested in watching it will have probably seen it by this point.

In The Visitor, we are introduced to an old man who lives by himself. It’s a dark and stormy night, and a young woman comes knocking at his door, seeking shelter from the rain. The old man introduces himself as Jake Sisko — but at this point, we, the audience, know Jake Sisko as the 18 year old son of the show’s lead, Captain Benjamin Sisko.

The old Jake explains to the young woman that at some point after he turned 18, his father died.

Boom. Right in there with the intrigue. Had Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really killed off its lead in the second episode of its fourth season? No, of course it hadn’t, and everyone watching knew that was the case. But it was still one hell of a way to get the audience’s attention prior to the opening credits rolling.

The Visitor continues with old Jake telling the story of what happened to his father — apparently an accident aboard the USS Defiant pushed Ben out of sync with reality, causing him to “time jump” at various intervals. He’d return to Jake for a while — sometimes a few days, sometimes just a moment — and Jake would be older, but he’d not have aged a day.

Long story short, Jake spends his life trying to figure out what exactly is going on with his father, and how he might be able to save him. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that the only way for him to prevent his father from springing through time, attached to him by an invisible thread, is for him to die. And so, it gradually becomes clear over the course of the episode, that old man Jake Sisko is going to die, and that this is the only way for Ben to return to his own time.

The way this episode is presented is beautiful. It cuts back and forth between Old Jake simply telling the story to his companion, and us actually seeing what was going on at various points in Old Jake’s “past” — including some delightful “aged up” takes on Dr Bashir and Jadzia Dax. It’s just so unusual and beautifully directed that it remains one of the most memorable episodes of the series to this day; I remembered it fondly from when I first saw it on VHS tape roughly when it was “current”, and it hasn’t lost any of its impact in the intervening years.

I’m now getting into episodes that are less familiar to me, because I drifted off watching Deep Space Nine partway through the fourth season. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I didn’t really have the money or space to keep investing in VHS tapes with just two episodes on each!

Recently, I watched an episode called Rules of Engagement, and this also does some interesting things with its direction. The concept of this episode is that Worf is facing a hearing for supposedly destroying a civilian vessel during a confrontation with the Klingon Empire, who are, throughout the fourth season, being A Bit Of A Dick, to put it mildly.

Similar to The Visitor, a lot of the narration takes place in the “present” through the words of the participants in the hearing, but it also cuts to scenes that are being remembered by the people involved and the witnesses. In these instances, there are situations where the characters are going about their business as they did back in the way, but narrating them as they go — and even speaking directly to the “viewer” at various points. Seeing a character in a TV show directly address you, as if you are a participant in proceedings — in this case, casting you in the role of one of the participants in Worf’s hearing — is quite unusual, and it’s used to striking effect in this episode.

I’m sure from some perspectives both of these framing devices can be looked upon as a little cheesy. But I was struck by both of them as being thoroughly unusual and interesting. Like I say, it’s entirely possible that I just haven’t watched any “good TV” for quite some time (I can’t remember the last series I watched from start to finish. Possibly Fringe? And that was years ago) and thus haven’t seen anyone being particularly ambitious with direction and storytelling. But it doesn’t really matter; what matters is that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine still stands out as spectacularly good television, even nearly 30 years later.

#oneaday Day 15: Station on the Frontier

Right! Yes. I was going to talk about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, wasn’t I. Okay, let’s do that.

I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I had a bit of a curious introduction to it. I grew up watching the endless reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on BBC2 at 6pm; that tended to coincide with family dinner time, so we’d often watch it on the kitchen TV while having our food. When Deep Space Nine launched in 1995, though, I feel like our family were initially a bit resistant to it. It was, after all, very different from what had been, at that point, the only two prior Star Trek series; for one thing, there was very little actual “trekking”, what with it being all set in one location, and the tone was very different from the optimistic nature of The Next Generation.

I kind of drifted away from it because of this; I personally hadn’t really found anything to dislike about it, but the fact my parents didn’t seem to enjoy it as much meant that I didn’t derive quite so much pleasure from it if it happened to be on around dinner time. (And of all the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine is arguably the one least appropriate for dinnertime viewing — not because it’s particularly gory or anything, but simply because its rather bleak tone and uncompromising look at certain less glamorous aspects of life among the stars made it more of a “primetime evening” sort of show.)

I watched the odd episode here and there, but I didn’t keep up with it. That all changed, however, when I spent a couple of weeks in London with my brother for my Year 10 work experience placement. Rather than be placed in the boring old local industrial area like most of my peers, I made arrangements to do my work experience in the PC Zone offices, since my brother was editor there at the time. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time, but that’s probably a story for another day.

No, the thing I particularly remember from that trip, besides my time in the office, was some discussion over Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s fourth season — which had recently started being broadcast on Sky satellite TV at the time, as I recall; the BBC’s reruns were a few seasons behind — and was just starting to come out on VHS cassette. I heard such enthusiasm for the new episodes from my brother and his peers that I wanted to find out a bit more about it for myself. So one lunchtime, I took a trip to the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, which was within walking distance from the Zone offices on Bolsover Street, and picked up video “4.1: The Way of the Warrior”. And I watched that feature-length episode that evening on my brother’s TV.

Not my copy; this is from a listing on eBay. I won’t lie, it is tempting to grab this for old time’s sake.

I was blown away; this was damned good TV, though I was quite conscious that I had clearly missed some rather important story beats somewhere along the way. Who were the Dominion? Why was Sisko now a captain, not a Commander? Why was he bald and bearded? Who was Kassidy Yates? What was up with the Klingons being all weird, after years of them being “no longer the bad guy” in The Next Generation?

I was confused, but enthralled nonetheless; after I got home, I started collecting the VHS cassettes from season 4 onwards. In retrospect, this was an enormous waste of money and space, since each tape only included two episodes and cost about £14.99, but as a teenager living out in the country, I didn’t have much else to spend my money on at the time other than video games. I built up quite a collection, and also, on someone’s recommendation, picked up the “3.1” volume “The Search”, which helped me understand a bit better who The Dominion actually were.

After some time, though, I drifted away from Deep Space Nine again. As before, it wasn’t that I disliked what I was seeing, but there were other factors at play — perhaps most notably the dawn of DVD as a distribution medium. By the time I got to university, DVD players were becoming much more accessible, and I was excited by all the movies I could now watch in what was, at the time, spectacularly good picture quality. I think at that point, collecting VHS tapes started to feel a bit less desirable — particularly since, as a student, I was living in a relatively limited amount of space.

As I recall, it took quite some time for all the Star Treks up to that point — The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager — to make it to DVD, and I just sort of got out of the habit of watching them. There was always a little voice at the back of my mind, though, that said “one day, you should watch all of Deep Space Nine and Voyager“. (I had, by this point, seen all of The Next Generation multiple times.)

I never quite got around to doing that. I started watching Star Trek on US Netflix for a while, but got fed up with having to use a VPN to do so, since they weren’t on UK Netflix at the time. Then I pretty much fell out of the habit of watching long-form TV and movies altogether; I much preferred the more active sense of entertainment I was getting from video games.

Cutting out many intervening years in which nothing of any real relevance to this story occurred, for my birthday this year I was fortunate enough to receive a box set of Deep Space Nine from my brother, who, true to what he had always said, left a note saying “it’s still the best one”. And so, having set up my now-mostly dormant PS4 (my PS5 plays all my PS4 games now) in the bedroom, I decided to start watching an episode or two before going to sleep of an evening.

As I type this, I’m about two-thirds of the way through Season 3, and I am absolutely loving the show. It shows its age in some ways — an episode set in “the future” of the time when it was broadcast turned out to be 2024, for example — but it’s definitely got it where it counts. Strong characters, excellent acting, compelling storylines, and above all, plenty of variety.

I’m not sure why my parents and I ever thought Deep Space Nine was “boring”. Because it absolutely is not, even in the first three seasons, which are commonly regarded as “the bit before it gets really good”. Some shows are epic in scale, while others are tight, character-driven pieces — and beneath it all, there’s a sense of coherence that The Next Generation didn’t really nail until its later seasons. This latter point is perhaps best exemplified by how, for quite some time, the best way to get The Next Generation VHS videos was not on an episode-by-episode basis, but in box sets that were each themed around a particular element of the show, such as Data, Q or the Borg. (I had several of these; they were cool display pieces as well as being pretty good value!)

The Data box set. Again, not my copy; this image is from fan wiki Memory Alpha. The back of the box opened up to reveal three VHS cassettes, with their cases designed to look like the positronic circuits inside Data’s head.

Deep Space Nine is from that point where American television really seemed to latch on to the fact that audiences enjoy serialised stories. Sure, it’s a risk — with heavily serialised shows, you run the risk of alienating anyone who isn’t on board from the start — but Deep Space Nine manages to remain mostly accessible throughout, as shown by my jumping in at The Way of the Warrior all those years ago, while truly rewarding those who are in it for the long haul.

It’s been a real pleasure to return to a series that, in retrospect, I’ve always liked a great deal. I feel I’m getting more out of it now than I did when I was younger — and this time, this time, I’m going to make it all the way to the end. I’m just a little sad that I never did so before several of the cast members passed away. But their memory shall live on.

The TikTokification of comedy

I fucking hate TikTok. I hate “short-form content” in general, which means I loathe YouTube Shorts, Instagram/Facebook Reels and anything anyone feels the need to send me that is in a 9:16 aspect ratio. So if you’re considering it… don’t. I won’t watch it.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won’t go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole “half a sentence” thumbnail format. I didn’t click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go “[our brand] is _________” and expect people to “fill in the blank”. And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn’t matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That’s all that mattered.

It’s the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don’t want to click on their videos because it’s rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of “best moments” that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you’ve enjoyed a complete story by the time you’ve left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert’s show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that’s a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I’m writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we’re learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it’s still relatable to anyone either going through that “20s to 30s” part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don’t really work as standalone “jokes” because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it’s frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It’s just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have “time” for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they’re doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I’m aware there’s nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it’s exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.

My new TV show obsession is Inside No. 9.

After greatly enjoying The Cleaner — which, I’m pleased to say, I continued to really like after the first few episodes I wrote about in the post linked — I decided that I should really try and wean myself off mindless stupid YouTube videos and watch some more things with a bit of substance to them.

So I decided to take a look at Inside No. 9, which is a show I’d seen a number of people talking about, but knew absolutely nothing about. For some reason, I’d developed the assumption that it was something to do with politics (I think I’d made the unprompted mental leap from “No. 9” to “10 Downing Street” or something) and thus hadn’t really paid it much mind.

But then I saw this news story shared by someone I know. (Caution: The Mirror. Also spoilers.) If that was the kind of show we were actually dealing with… then I was absolutely, completely on board. I love this kind of gleefully experimental, darkly humorous stuff, and it seems like I’ve missed out on rather a lot of Inside No. 9 since it first aired in 2014.

I’m going to try not to talk too much about specifics of the show in this post, because it really is one of those series where the less you know what to expect going in, the more effective it is at what it does. So for now I’ll simply say that it is the work of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two members of the League of Gentlemen, and it is some absolutely masterful television.

And I’ll leave that there for those who are sufficiently intrigued to check it out for themselves. It’s a BBC show, so you can watch it on iPlayer (or, presumably, BritBox in the States) and I think it has also had physical releases. Based on the three episodes I have watched so far, I have nothing but the highest praise for it, and highly recommend it.

For those who want to know a bit more and aren’t too concerned about mild spoilers (which I’m still going to try and keep to a minimum), I’m going to drop in a “read more” tag here, and you can join me after the jump to find out a little more if you see fit.

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Let’s talk about something a bit more positive for once: I’m really enjoying Greg Davies’ The Cleaner.

I’m aware I’ve posted a fair amount of negative complaining of late, and while I don’t apologise for that — a lot of these things really need to be said, and by more people than just me — I don’t just want to be whingeing all the time. So today I thought I’d write about something I like.

The Cleaner is a new-ish TV series written by and starring comedian Greg Davies, who is probably best known these days as the titular Taskmaster in the excellent “famous people make fools of themselves” programme of the same name. Davies has starred in a number of comedy-drama titles in recent years, however, and I’ve always liked seeing him do his thing.

I believe my first encounter with him was as Mr Gilbert from The Inbetweeners, where I very much enjoyed how much his character resembled my own head of Sixth Form, Mr Watts, in terms of overall attitude and general disdain for anyone under the age of 18. More recently, I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical series Man Down very much — though I know opinions are somewhat divided on that one, particularly with regard to Rik Mayall’s role — and I believe that The Cleaner is his strongest series to date.

The show is apparently an adaptation of a German show known as Der Tatortreiniger, or simply Crime Scene Cleaner, but it’s clear from the script that Davies has very much taken the concept and made it his own along the way. It features recognisable elements of both the whimsical, occasionally cynical humour and pathos that Davies excels at, and holds together as an extremely well-produced show.

In The Cleaner, Davies takes the role of Wicky, a crime scene cleaner who has to deal with the aftermath of various horrible things happening. Each episode primarily unfolds as a “two-hander” between Davies and someone who was affected by the crime in question; the context is that Davies has shown up to clean up the mess left behind by the crime after the police have finished their investigation, and there is inevitably someone hanging around or left behind, with varying degrees of relation to the incident.

Greg Davies and Helena Bonham Carter in episode 1 of The Cleaner

My favourite thing about the show so far, after seeing four episodes of it, is that each individual story has its own vibe to it, with Wicky remaining the one constant.

It’s clear that Wicky is a man who enjoys his job — in the fourth episode, he reveals that it is because it allows him to get a taste of how other people live, if only for a moment, and to set things right for those who had to depart before their time — and is, at his core, quite an intelligent man.

At the same time, there’s a certain degree of “salt of the earth” to him; he quite openly admits that “my job lets me buy everything I need and still have enough to get hungover every weekend”, and there are often very minor threads running in the background of each episode about his love for curry night at the pub, his friends being sick in his shoes and suchlike.

It’s his interactions with the various characters where the show really shines, though, and the way in which all of these characters are very different from one another.

David Mitchell and Greg Davies in episode 2 of The Cleaner

In the first episode, for example, Wicky is cleaning up after a wife murdered her husband in an extremely messy manner. Partway through the cleaning process, he is confronted with the wife in question (played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is still, it has to be said, exceedingly beautiful even when dressed down and covered in blood) and this leads to an extremely strained scenario in which he is very much aware that he is dealing with a murderer, but also finds himself forming something of a bond with her in the process.

In the second, meanwhile, David Mitchell does a wonderful job of portraying a tortured author whose grandmother has just been killed in a gas fire accident. Mitchell is almost certainly drawing on some of his own experience — or at least, that of the persona he perpetually puts across in public — to portray this writer as emotionally repressed to such a degree that he cried more over his cat running away than the gory, doubtless extremely painful death of his grandmother.

In the third, Wicky never gets to visit the crime scene at all, instead finding himself having to contend with the victim’s neighbour (Ruth Madeley) while waiting for someone to actually let him in to the crime scene. With his “partner” in this episode being both vegan and disabled, Wicky finds himself constantly putting his foot in his mouth to an exceedingly cringeworthy degree — but again, he forms a bond of note with this young woman.

Stephanie Cole and Greg Davies in episode 4 of The Cleaner

And in the fourth, Wicky is called to a stately home in which an elderly woman (Stephanie Cole) interrupted a burglary attempt, which resulted in the death of the burglar by him falling down the stairs and breaking his neck. Cole’s character gradually reveals herself to have many layers of unpleasantness to her, but Wicky is faced with a variety of dilemmas to contend with along the way as, again, he forms a temporary but surprisingly strong bond with her.

One of the things I’ve noticed about the show in general is how Wicky always “leaves something behind” as a result of his visits; he always makes a mark on that person’s life in some form or another.

Sometimes, this is a positive thing, such as in the third episode, where he helps Madeley’s character come to terms with how she is still in love with the man she abandoned for not respecting her veganism. At others, however, it is very much not a good thing, such as where he accidentally drops a signed Dylan Thomas book belonging to Mitchell’s character into his bucket of water, thereby completely destroying the signature and personal message inside the front matter.

Greg Davies and Ruth Madeley in episode 3 of The Cleaner

After four episodes, I’m very much convinced that this is an excellent show, and I’m a little disappointed I didn’t come across it sooner! But this is to be expected, as I tend not to follow what’s on TV right now these days; I only stumbled across this as the result of a short clip the BBC posted on YouTube the other day, featuring a snippet from Mitchell’s episode.

For everything I hate about short-form “content” and clip culture, and how it has collectively destroyed the attention spans of almost everyone, I have to at least be grateful for it in this instance, otherwise I might never have come across this genuinely excellent show!

You can watch The Cleaner on BBC iPlayer at the time of writing.

2520: The Grand Tour

I’ve been watching Amazon’s new “totally not Top Gear, oh wait it is really and we’re not even trying to hide it” show The Grand Tour recently. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes and it’s been a lot of fun.

The show follows Top Gear’s format pretty closely, usually featuring a single longer film split into two or more chunks over the course of the episode, punctuated by shorter regular features that are usually played more for laughs than anything. The longer film tends to offer a blend between Clarkson, May and Hammond’s usual silly activities and some thoughts on their cars of the week, deflecting the common criticisms of Top Gear’s latter years in which people accused it of not really being a car show any more.

The longer features have been enjoyably varied so far. One week featured a hilarious sequence of Clarkson, May and Hammond attempting to complete a military exercise — in this case, the “car of the week” was used to assist them in their getaway from an eventually successful rescue mission — while another featured an attempt to recreate the “Grand Tour” of years gone by, whereby wealthy young gentlemen would travel around continental Europe in an attempt to learn more about culture and the arts. (The latter was enjoyably undermined by Hammond turning up in a noisy Dodge and repeatedly doing donuts at every opportunity while Clarkson and May drove an Aston Martin and a Rolls-Royce in an attempt to be more “refined” respectively.)

The shorter features are a little hit and miss. “Conversation Street” — essentially a part of the show where the three talk in a rather unstructured manner similar to the “news” section of Top Gear — tends to work well, as the group has great chemistry as always, and plenty to talk about. “Celebrity Braincrash”, meanwhile, ostensibly a segment where they invite a celebrity on to participate in a difficult quiz, but where the celebrities in question inevitably die in some comedically ridiculous manner on their way to the tent that plays host to the show, is a gag that kind of ran its course in the first show and would have probably been better served being replaced by something new in subsequent episodes.

Likewise, the show’s replacement for the Top Gear test track is a cool course with some entertaining gimmicks, but “The American”, the show’s Stig-equivalent, isn’t a patch on the understated, mute hilarity of Top Gear’s anonymous driver. Like Celebrity Braincrash, “The American” is a bit of a one-note joke, though thankfully in this case not one that is repeated in every episode.

Despite its flaws, however, I’ve been enjoying The Grand Tour, and it’s proven to be an enjoyable successor to Top Gear. I watched a few episodes of the new Top Gear with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc and didn’t hate it, though it wasn’t the same at all; the chemistry and sense of genuine friendship that Clarkson, May and Hammond had built up over the years simply wasn’t there with the new cast. Fortunately, with the existence of The Grand Tour, this is no longer an issue, since those who enjoyed Top Gear’s old way of doing things can now simply get more of the same.

Some might call that unimaginative. I would call it eminently sensible on Amazon’s part, and great for the people who just wanted more of the show they enjoyed without radical changes.

2504: Tears of the Prophets

Reached the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s sixth season this evening and despite inadvertently spoiling myself on the death of a major character some months earlier (though given Deep Space Nine’s age, I’m surprised I lasted this long without spoilers!), it remained an impactful episode and an excellent season finale.

I really like how Deep Space Nine developed. While it started as something of a “soap opera in space”, which is why some people found it a little dull when compared to the galaxy-spanning adventures of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the gradual buildup of the Dominion storyline into all-out war throughout the sixth season gave the show scope to deftly and subtly readjust its focus over time.

At the end of the sixth season, it’s still recognisably distinct from the more “mobile” Star Trek series such as The Next Generation and Voyager, but the action following Sisko and his comrades into battle against the Dominion gets the action off the station often enough to keep things fresh and interesting — and Tears of the Prophets, the sixth season finale, features some spectacular space combat sequences, an area in which Deep Space Nine generally excels.

One thing I’ve found particularly interesting about the show as a whole is the development of the character Gul Dukat. Initially presented as a character whose motivations and overall alignment wasn’t entirely clear, he’s had plenty of significant moments over the course of the series, ranging from joyful to tragedy. When he’s at his lowest ebb, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him, because the show certainly kicks the shit out of him, but Tears of the Prophets makes it abundantly clear why it took such pains to make us sympathise with Dukat as he lost everything he held dear.

Dukat’s losses drive him to absolute desperation. He willingly allows himself to be possessed by a Pah-Wraith, the antithesis to the “Prophets”, aliens who live in the wormhole that Deep Space Nine protects. The Wraith kills [REDACTED so you don’t have to suffer like I did] and apparently cuts off the connection between the Prophets and Bajor before leaving Dukat’s body. We’re left to see Dukat with a few regrets — most notably the death of [AHEM] — but an overall sense that he’s enacted vengeance that he’s satisfied with.

This sequence — and the consequences therein — highlight another reason why I enjoy Deep Space Nine: it doesn’t attempt to explain everything away with (fake but plausible) science. Oh, sure, there’s plenty of traditional Star Trek technobabble throughout the series, but also there’s a real sense that some things simply are unknowable and impossible to understand by humanity at its stage of development in the 24th century. The recognition and embracing of this is the basis of religion (or spiritualism at the very least) and Deep Space Nine as a whole handles this sort of thing very nicely. It also makes for some extremely dramatic moments, as metaphysical, “supernatural” things are far less predictable than those which can be explained by science.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the series ends, and am very glad that I’ve finally got around to watching it all the way through for the first time. I’m even more glad that doing so is a simple matter of watching it on Netflix rather than collecting however many hundred VHS cassettes would have formed the complete run on its original release!