A night of science (and fiction)

Sunday night is a bit of a TV treat for me. We had the marvelous Wonders of the Universe first up, presented by the effortlessly cool Brian Cox. He is just such a dude. He also has the amazing capacity to make infinitely complex science ideas easy to understand. Accompanied by ultra-cool CGI visuals and a rather bizarre metaphor comparing an old prison building to a star, Cox led us on a whistle-stop tour through the elements and how they are made.

This kind of show really does just blow your mind wide open. The theories and ideas on offer and as spellbinding as they are majestically large and expansive to grasp. Major kudos to the BBC for giving such faith to a series like this and putting it in a prime-time slot, much like they did with Cox's recent Stargazing Live series. This is space, for the Facebook generation - pure scientific poetry... and all delivered in Cox's charming Northern accent.

As a big science fiction fan, anything to do with space has always fascinated me (especially when there's cool special effects). A particular favourite moment of mine from this episode was when Cox's old prison/star metaphor came to a dramatic end - the prison exploding while Cox himself walked away in slow motion as if that kind of thing happens every day. He's like the James Bond of Astronomy.

And if that wasn't enough, the night of space-based thrills continued in the form of the Outcasts series finale. Anyone's who's read my other blog posts about the show will know how much praise I have for it, and it was with a heavy heart and many emotions that I came to this last episode. And the show most definitely went out with a bang.

Fleur was absolutely amazing this episode. Her and Cass have been the beating heart of this series, but tonight Fleur was every inch the star. With the revelation she is in fact a special breed of AC, we saw her joining Rudi; leaving behind her past life in Forthaven.

Rushing through a hotbed of political drama between Tate, Julius and Jack as well as a deadly outbreak of infection, there was one moment this episode was all building too... the space-ship touching down on the surface of Carpathia. Again, this is the stuff sci-fi is designed for and My God was it amazing. Put simply, the best cliffhanger I have seen in a long, long time.

The BBC NEEDS to make another series of Outcasts. They just can't leave it there. There's so much more to explore on Carpathia...

Outcasts... the penultimate episode

Wasn't Cass a naughty boy this episode, eh? Just when we thought him and Fleur were finally going to get it together, he goes and spoils it all. Running off for a quick drunken shag with a woman caught up in all kinds of domestic marital troubles, he ends up nearly getting buries alive in a container full of sand. Not pleasant at all.

And acting as a counterpoint to all this, we had perhaps one of the most chilling moments of the series so far - Richard Tate coming face to face with his 'alien' twin. The mysterious copy-cats from last episode return, with a few words of warning for the colonists. Apparently they're all going to die. In his desperation Tate goes off to the mountains to try and get the AC leader to help him. Big mistake. All he gets for his efforts are bruises. We also find out that the 'aliens' seem OK with the AC's living on Carpathia and that only the Forthaven residents are 'prey'. According to Tate's mysterious twin, they will soon end up like the fossilised remains on the beach. Spooky.

As we found out more about Cass's shady past, I think we all breathed a collective sigh of dissapointment that he had screwed things up quite so badly with Fleur, prompting her to let loose and shack up with Jack. See what all those human emotions have done? Forthaven could quite easily descend into a hotbed of Eastenders-esque affairs.

And then we have the brilliant twist at the end, Julius calling up his buddies on the space-ship floating in orbit around Carpathia (which still hasn't landed), finding out that Fleur might not be entirely 'normal', or even fully human.

All brilliant stuff. My only worry is how can they possibly wrap all this up in one final episode? I eagerly await next week...

Catching up with Outcasts - Episode 6

I'm still loving absolutely loving Outcasts, it really is the best thing on TV at the moment. I think it's such a shame that the BBC have been so quick to move it to a late night Sunday slot just because it hasn't achieved good ratings/good public feedback. The BBC is supposed to be all about championing challenging new dramas and introducing them to new audiences, so by being so limp-wristed at backing Outcasts at the first time of trouble, it really goes against this. Hopefully they'll still have the faith to make a second series, because quite frankly, there's so much more to Carpathia and its characters that I want to find out.

As it stands, we've got only a couple of episodes left to tie everything up, a rather large feat considering the dramatic end to episode five as another landing ship was revealed, floating in high-orbit over the planet. And even more chilling, Julius was in contact with it. His creepiness goes without saying; whether it's his quasi-religious speeches or silver-tongued persuasiveness, he represents himself as the ultimate manipulator.

In Episode six we got a fascinating exploration into the introduction of the idea that there are 'things' out there on Carpathia. We saw Tate 'seeing'his children, convinced they were real and not a hallucination. And now everyone sees a creepy duplicate of soldier Josie Hunter. Her kids can tell something's not quite right, and so can we, already underminding the immense swell of emotion we felt when she stumbled safely home from the dangers of the desert.

One line got to me more than any other this episode though, when one of Josie's kids tells us the fake Josie that kidnapped them 'wanted to know what love was'. This sent a chill right down my spine, similar to how I felt when I saw the skulls and bones Stella uncovered in the previous episode. We have to remember that although Outcasts has kept many traditional sci-fi elements on the back-burner, what we have here is essentially, that good old staple - an alien. A being not of Earth. Whether it will be truly 'revealed' this series remains to be seen though.

Other highlights this episode were a couple of ACs breaking into Forthaven and turning all the lights off; the sight of a disembodied hand surging up through the sand to claw a tunnel under the perimeter fence was thrilling and acted as a nice little parallel story to all the Josie Hunter stuff.

I'd like to give mention to the series' brilliant music too; the main theme and the various variations of it are beautiful and fit the look and feel of the show so well.