Of This and Other Worlds

I am three episodes into S2 of Blake's 7 and sadly, I have gone from quite liking Blake and being mystified as to why he is not more popular, to actively wanting to smack him around. I have also gone from thinking the scripts coherent and effective if a bit over-explanatory at times to finding them annoyingly cryptic and at times utterly baroque. Chris Boucher, what have you done with Terry Nation and how soon can we get him back?

( MOAR SPOILERS PLS )

And now to bed.

It has just occurred to me that I never reacted to the South Pole episode of House -- mostly because I somehow contrived to miss it when it first aired (so you can imagine my surprise at the beginning of the next episode when House confronted Wilson about dating you-know-who!). However, I've seen it now and WHOA.

Please tell me there is good House/Cate fic out there somewhere. Because it is totally my new OTP, and if there isn't any I fear I may have to write some myself.

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Speaking of fandom, I have just discovered Blake's 7. We're only three episodes into S1 so far, but my husband and I are already hooked big-time.

Unsurprisingly for a fan of Sherlock Holmes, Snape, Jack Bristow and Beltanno MacRannoch, I love Avon best (though I'm sure my interest will wane if he doesn't demonstrate a bit more humanity soon). But I'm also surprised by how much I like Blake. I've heard so little about him, I thought he must be kind of a bland and uninteresting character compared to Vila, Cally, and so on. I even had a vague suspicion that he might be a shadowy or absent figure a la Charlie of Charlie's Angels. But in fact he's not only right in the middle of the action, he's pretty cool. I like Jenna, too, and I don't remember hearing anything about her from the B7 fans on my list at all.

The special effects are as bad as anything in Classic Who, but I'm really impressed by the dialogue, scripts and acting so far (well, except for Brian Blessed in ep. 3 gnawing off enormous chunks of scenery and spitting them all over the screen, but that's Brian Blessed). I especially admire the way that B7 captures the banality of evil -- in the first two episodes at least the villains don't sit around cackling and rubbing their hands or being villainous to each other for dramatic effect, they behave and speak like ordinary people who have sunk into evil so gradually they don't even seem to realize it. It's very well done. MOAR PLS.
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I fail at the promised reviews, I know, I know. Coming soon.