Questing For Peace

Okay. Superman.

In a way, he's the ultimate personification of the American Dream. He's the definitive alien immigrant. And I love him.

It's a long seated love, mainly rooted in the Christopher Reeve movies rather than the comics, because growing up as a kid in the north of England, the only place that I went to regularly that sold comics was the chemists in the Galleries at Washington. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I started frequenting Forbidden Planet, and even then, the whole history of comic books seemed to be far too complicated to just dive right in. It's a hobby that requires a lot of time, effort and most importantly, money. I briefly tried to get into the whole comic book nerd scene, but I was spending about fifty quid a month just to try and keep up with the core DC titles (those relating to Batman and Superman) and even then I felt like I was missing out of a whole load of stuff. So mostly my comic book love comes from graphic novels, where you can be sure you're getting the whole story and there's no worry that you're going to go to the comic shop and find out they've sold out of Part 5 of a six part story. It's not a bad way of going about things. You still get the quality stories (Watchmen, The Death Of Superman, A Death In The Family) without all the stress. So I'm laying my cards on the table here because whereas I would call myself a fan, I'm not hardcore.

So let us tal about why Superman is the greatest hero alive.

When I was a kid, I preferred Batman. Seriously. I mean, Superman was all well and good, but he was invulnerable, whereas Batman was dangerous and real and he could be hurt. And Tim Burton's Batman is a great movie.

So what happened? Well, when I was a kid, I thought that the best Star Wars movie was Return Of The Jedi. Now, I think it's The Empire Strikes Back. But by that rationale, my favourite Star Trek movie (The Wrath Of Khan in case you didn't know) would have changed as well, and it hasn't, and Blade Runner has been my faourite film since I was fourteen (the same age I was when I as espousing the opinion that Jedi was the best Star Wars film). I think a lot of it does have to do with growing up though. What you think is cool when you're a kid is not necessarily what you think is cool when you're grown up, and vice versa. If you'd told my eight year old self that in twenty years he'd not only own several Elton John albums but also actually enjoy listening to them and advocate him to his friends he'd have laughed in your face and then probably run off to listen to Kylie Minogue (again, some things never change, Kylie still rocks) or that he'd still love Mary Poppins and ET and Choose Your Own Adventure books and he wouldn't believe you. So, opinions about some things change and some things stay the same.

Somewhere in between Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (a tiny screening room at the Sunderland Empire, one of only two times my mother took me to the cinema, summer 1987) and Superman Returns (Gateshead UCI, probably by myself aged 25, summer 2006) Superman became my hero. Batman Begins (and like it or not, Batman's legacy was far more ruined by Batman and Robin than Superman's ever was by The Quest For Peace) had come out the previous year and was loved by me but in that nineteen year gap I had read The Death Of Superman (and watched and enjoyed four years of Lois and Clark and also a whole bunch of Smallville, which remains one of the most peculiarly paced of modern TV shows).

The Death Of Superman, originally published in 1993, at about the same period of time that Batman was getting his back broken, leading to one of the biggest shake ups in DC comics history (well, post Crisis on Infinite Earths history), is one of my favourite graphic novels of all time and certainly my favourite graphic novel with a hero like Superman at its core (the others, like Watchmen are limited series, as opposed to part of a serial comic). It was that book which allowed me to finally understand just what Superman is all about.

Not to cheapen Batman, but he does what he does because he feels he has to. He's driven to fight injustice by the murder of his parents. He is, in a sense, a psychopath himself, because he has these deep rooted psychological drives. Superman does what he does because he can. What he does, no one else can so he feels he has a duty. He has an obligation to serve and protect.

This duty is at the core of The Death Of Superman. It features the villain Doomsday, a raging, animalistic creature of mysterious origins. In the first issue he appears out of nowhere and immediately goes about trashing the place. The Justice League try and stop him and get collectively trounced. The entire Justice League. Some of them are hurt, badly. So Supes comes in and, after a long fight, manages to defeat Doomsday, but only at the cost of his own life. He gives so much to protect Metropolis (and Lois in partcular) that he dies. He sacrifices himself to save the city. And he does this without a second thought. . He doesn't even think about anything else. He only thinks to try and stop Doomsday, by any means necessary.

There's a moment in Superman Returns which perfectly captures this sense. It's near the start of the film and the bi action set piece with the plane. It's hurtling towards Earth, promising certain death for all those aboard (which, incidentallhy includes Lois). He grabs hold of a wing, but it comes loose, sending Supes reeling. As soons as he gets his equilibrium back, he's flying back down towards the plane as fast as he can. Naturally, this involves flying in a straight line. Unfortunately, that path is slightly occupied by the wing that's come loose. No matter, Supes just steels himself and flies straight through it.

It's a completely throaway moment, and if you want to be a pedant about it, we know he's Superman, a rogue airplane wing isn't going to bother him. But it's a moment in which you know that Bryan Singer knows and care about Superman. There's a lot wrong with Superman Returns (a lopsided dramatic structure, Kate Bosworth's complete lack of charisma, the whole Son of Superman subplot - which might become problematic if the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, which has Supes erase his love affair with Lois by turning time back, a la the first movie as opposed to the original version with its 'magic kiss' becomes the default version, which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, given that the HD release contains only the Donner cut, with the theatrical release relegated to the bog standard DVD - and Frank Langella's phoned in performance as Perry White) but its heart is in the right place. If Singer stays on board, and can get over his relentless hero worship of the original Donner film, the franchise is in safe hands. They've already made moves in the right direction, promising a more villain led plot and the recasting of Katie Holmes' soporific Rachel from Batman Begins with the sublime Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Dark Knight is an indicator that they (that is, DC and Warners) are not afraid to admit to their mistakes and get rid of cast members that didn't gel.

Peace out.

"Why Don't You (Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone?)"

Let us talk, you and I, a little while. Let us talk about depression. Actually, no, let us talk about one of the root causes of my depression: Loneliness.

At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.

I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.

While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.

She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.

No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?

Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.

So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.

Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.

In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.

But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?

I'm really getting too old for this shit.

Lovers Town Revisited, or My Adventures With Girls Not Named Natalie

It's Sunday. Again, and like pretty much every Sunday for a long while now, I've had the day off. I may hate working every Saturday, but at least it gives me the Sunday off. Not that I'm generally appreciating it at the moment.

Okay, Ashley. After a great deal of cajoling on my behalf by Shaun, I finally got her number. Not that it was an easy thing. She apparently asked Shaun to get me to ring her at work (she's the phone jockey at a pizza place along Birtley). So I got on my break and I do. I say Hi, it's Mark. She says, Mark who? which is a great start. I say that it's Mark from Shaun's party. She says hi, but that she's got to go now.

You know me enough by now to know how fucking paranoid I get. I'm sitting there, on my break, feeling like I'm going to throw up. I mean, was it some sort of joke on Shaun's part, on Ashley's? It turns out that it isn't, it's just that her boss popped up and obviously talking to mates on the phone when you're supposed to be at work isn't the done thing. So Shaun says he got a text off Ash to give me her number. This he does and I text her and we have an interesting night of bouncing text messages back and forth. The penultimate one comes about one o'clock. Me and Shaun are still up watching Doctor Who (another thing I hate about working Saturdays) and she says she's going to bed. An hour later, I'm in bed watching telly and my phone goes. It's Ashley again, saying if I want to ring her, I can. So I ring her. We talk for about quarter of an hour, about nothing in particular, although the whole age difference between us does come up and she says she wants to be friends, nothing more when I make a comment about us having a 'relationship' (I think I freaked her out a little then, what is it with me and saying stupid things during late night phone calls? Were it not for me blurting out 'love you' to Alison we might well still be together, or at least it might not have ended so miserably after three weeks). After a while we each go to bed. I promise to text her tomorrow.

This I do. She'd said on the phone that she was going out to the town with a friend today so I text her and suggest that maybe once she's finished in town she could come over and we could hang out. She texts back that she's hanging out with her friend all day. I reply that that's no bother ad maybe we could do something during the week and was there anything on at the pictures she fancied going to see, the implication clearly being that we could go and see a film together.

That was at one o'clock this afternoon. It's now half eleven and she still hasn't texted back. Hello Mr Paranoid.

So. Let's forget Ashley for the minute and let's just wonder over my whole history with girls and how I seem to fuck everything up comprehensively. Most recently, we have Kayleigh who I liked and who I thought liked me. She arranged to come over one afternoon after a weekend of texts which I took to be very flirty. I made some moves and she freaks out, although she doesn't tell me. She tells the Guv and gets her to tell me. Since then she hasn't come over. Even Natalie hasn't been over and she seemed to find very convinient excuses every time I asked her over to watch Harry Potter (god, that sounds a bit twisted, but in all honesty, that's all it was going to be) and now she's off to Tenerife to work in a bar so it's odds on that I ever see her again. You have to start wondering when girls are actually leaving the country rather than spending time wth you (and yes, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in hyperbole, I probably don't even begin to figure on Nat's list of things that she'll miss about the Mow let alone being the sole reason she's leaving).

I try too hard, apparently. Even Christina has said that and for Christina to make a comment that doesn't directly relate to herself, it's a major thing. But what can I say? In my twenty seven years on this Earth, even if you only take into account the period from my first kiss (August 1998) that's still nearly a decade in which I have had relationshipness for seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. I've probably spent longer watching Star Trek over that period (at which point Christina, probably thinking she's some stellar wit, would most likely opine that that is specifically the reason why I don't have a girlfriend). So, yeah, I'm desperate. But only for something that everyone else has.

You see, all these people offering advice are in relationships or have had significant relationships and entering into another relationship at some point in the future is not some impossible goal. Like it is for me. I have my low periods (or perhaps I should say 'lower' periods, because I am generally low,all the time anyway) and in those periods, I'm always reminded that there are people youger than me who are married and have kids. Pretty much everyone I went to school with is in a long term serious relationship. Blades and Will have been together for something like seven years, Emma and Haz are coming up for being together an entire decade. Even Amy and Ali have been together something like four years. And out of the single triumvirate that once existed composed of me, Gilli and Tom, Tom is now happily living with Emily and anyway, both Gilli and Tom have had serious relationships before. It's not like some great mental block that they have. I think I might be incapable of being in a relationship, at least not without fucking it up in some way. I fucked it up with Sarah quite consciously and maybe my subconscious was trying to sabotage my relationship with Alison. Seven weeks out of a decade is nothing. Most people would hae spent a lot longer than that on holiday during that time. And if I was to work out the amount of time me and Sarah spent together during that month or how long me and Alison enjoyed each other's company, it'll boil down to even less.

Maybe I should just face up to the fact that I'm not boyfriend material. Fuck, I'm hardly even friend material.

The area manager and the Guv had a talk with me on Thursday. I had a little stressout on Tuesday and the Guv had a few words with me. Then the area manager comes in and puts on his 'friend' hat and tries to talk to me but just comes off as being patronising. I tell him that my depression is in large part due to my lack of relationshipness and he says that it happens to everyone. I felt like asking him if he knew how it felt to be more or less single for ten long lonely years. Or how it felt to have only had three girls who liked me enough to even kiss me in the last five. And one of those was completely pissed out of her mind. Because I know he won't. He's married and he's got a kid. There's something that happens to you when you have that sort of security. You stop being able to comprehend the fear.

The fear of course is the fear of dying alone. Actually, no, it's the fear of having the live your entire life alone. Dying is, by virtue of the act itself, something everyone does alone. Sure, you may have peolpe around you when you kick the bucket, but the actual dying? That's something you do alone. Living a solitary life? Now that's difficult.

It would be impossible I think, for a lot of people. In fact, as I have said before on occasion, put someone else in my shoes, give them my family life and all the bullying and the esteem issues and see how well they cope. I think that it's a testament to my strength of will (or sheer bloody-mindedness, whichever) that I'm even still here at all and as well adjusted as I am (which,as I'm sure you'llbe aware isn't massively, but I'm not exactly a back brain recluse yet, am I?).

Back when I was a kid and actually believed in God, I used to pray at night and wish for the chances everyone else got. And that's all I still want, although events have precluded my belief in any sort of higher power, all I want is for what everyone else has. Or at the very least, a chance to have what everyone else has. You know, you see people coming into the shop - complete dickheads with no discernable personality or even borderline good looks and they have girlfriends. You have to look at them and then consider yourself and wonder just what the fuck it is that is so repellant about you that girls just don't like you.

I've got an appointment at the doctor's on Friday. Seeing him about my depression. Part of me still hates the idea of popping a bunch of pills to make my life better because as far as I can see it, my life is shit because of outside forces. I'm considering counselling, but the cynical part of me knows that it's going to be the same old patronising bullshit that everyone's been trying to feed me since I was eighteen, just so they can comfort themselves that they are helping but without actually putting themselves out.

Fuck.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

It's just after six o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Late April, so it's still pretty light outside, even though it's been a shitty day (the highlight being when I was out in the yard earlier tidying up all the cans that the local yobbo's chuck over my fence thinking my yard is a rubbish bin). It's been a shitty day generally. I've been flu-ridden all week, managed to recover enough to go to Shaun's party on Friday night (more on that later) yet I have spent today doing a bit of housework (I stress the 'bit' portion of that phrase) and fooling around on the internet and on my Playstation. Doing, in short, nothing constructive whatsoever.

Why?

To be honest with you, I have no fucking idea. Am I depressed? Not massively so. Something happened on Friday night that cheered me up no end. True, light was ched on said events on Saturday which might give me cause to doubt the intentions of what happened, but compared with the sheer mundanity of my life, it was practically a godsend, and when I finally get round to teling you what happened, you might begin to comprehend just how sad my life actually is. I've even had a conceptual breakthrough on 'Bridge End' today, finding the tone of the piece and the central thread, which s a big thing, even if I haven't done any antual honest-to-God writing on it. So whyam I depressed? Is it because that depression is just my natural state of being?

I was out in Newcastle the other weekend because Gilli was up. I hadn't planned on it; I was at work till eleven, but I had such a crappy day that I needed to go out and get drunk. Or at least pissed. So there we were, me and Gilli, and you know us two, we are of very similar temperaments. In fact, were certain circumstances different, I think me and her would make a very good couple. But circumstances aren't and it's no use complaining about it. So me and Gilli, we're both fairly depressive people and we are, as paradoxical as it sounds, happy with that. Both of us are comfortable with not being shiny and happy. And to us, that's not a bad thing. I remember John Brosnan, that late, great sf critic whose personal belief was that being depressed was a natural state of being because happiness, when achieved, was always fleeting, so you would soon return to a state of depression. Of course, John Brosnan essentially drank himself to death and his body was nly found because of the smell it started to produce.

But there is a point there, and it's a very valid one. Happiness doesn't last.

There's also a school of thought which equates depression to intelligence. Now, I don't generally espouse this theory because it makes me sound like a right twat, but I am an intelligent person. I am, somehow (as I'm not even sure myself how it happened) something of an intellectual, especially when it coems to my peers at work. And I'm a thinker. I analyse things. I think. I think too much. I over-analyse. And that's my downfall. Were I less of an intellectual I presume I could quite hapily just bumble through life and not worry about things. For fuck's sake, I started worrying when we were in primary school and my teacher told me that in about thirty years we were going to run out of oil (and that, for those of you keeping score, was twenty years ago, give or take a couple of years). I broached the subject with my sister who essentially told me not to worry about it because we'd have undoubtedly found a substitute by then. So...

I am depressed because I can think about things. It's not that cut and paste, natch, but that's the long and the short of it.

Right, Friday night. Shaun's birthday party. Some of his friends were there, natch, including the oft-mentioned Lauren and Ashley. And seeing as how for a great portion of the night I was Billy No-Mates (Kayleigh and Emma came much later than I did and even then spent a good amount of time off somewhere and Shaun had a family crisis to deal with) I ended up talking to Ashley a lot. It transpired that she was single and had recently split up with her boyfriend. He finished her, I have to say, because it is fairly important to what comes later. Through the course of conversation we somehow manage to establish that I think she's fit and we spend most of the night flirting with each other. She's drinking a fair amount of vodka, but at the time I don't think about it. Towards the end of the night, she drags me up on the dance floor and dances with me. Properly dances with me, holding hands, hugging me and all that, not just wanting someone to share the dance floor with. So I think that maybe she likes me. I try to play it cool and ask her if she fancies going out sometime (not the greatest line ever, but I like it - it's honest and straightforward). She says that she doesn't think she's ready. She had just split up with her boyfriend. So I say okay, she sasks me if that's alright. I say yes, because it is, honestly. I've seen some unpleasent things happen when people rebound off each other. It never ends well. So here I push my luck a little and ask her if she'd like to maybe do something sometime after she's had a chance to get over him. It's not the kind of move that I would usually make. Hell, asking someone out in the first place isn't the kind of move I generally make after barely meeting someone. So yes, I'm pushing my luck but I have to take this chance because you never know, I might never see her again. So she says that I should get her number off Shaun and there we part company.

Well, before I get on with the story there is a little detail that I should add. Right. So we're up on the dance floor and she's getting into it. And I mean really getting into it. Kayleigh referred to it later as dirty dancing and she's not really exaggerating. There's parts of bodies getting rubbed together which send me a fairly strng signal. So I go to kiss her. This is after I've asked her out. She says she's not ready, so we end up not kissing (and this is after all the rubbage) apart from on the cheek. Me, girls and mixed signals. It's a motif.

Later. Me and Shaun are waling home. I ask and he tells me that Ashley and her ex have been split up exactly one day.

Great. I finally meet a single girl who might actually like me and she's just (and by just it might as well have been right that second) split up with her ex. But you know, I think we can do the friend thing, get to know each other, take it slowly. Because me and Alison rushed it and that ended badly. So, the next day, I ask Shaun for her number. Thinking I might ask her out to the pictures or something. He says that he would, but he's going to ring her first to make sure it's okay. According to Shaun, she says that she doesn't know if she wants me to ring her or text her or whatever. And this is when the paranoia sets in. This is when I start to think that she had her vodka-goggles on the night before and in the cold light of day she's thinking to herself 'what the hell did I do last night?' and then I pop into her head and she thinks 'ew, gross' and vows never to see me again. So Shaun's texting her, trying to persuade her to go out with me or whatever, I don't know. He does have a bit of a history of harrassing girls to try and get them to go out with me, which I'm fairly ambivalent about. I'm not a pushy person by nature. Shaun is, and I'm of the opinion that if he keeps hassling them, they're going to be less inclined to be interested in me. It's the old pestering thing. And we all know how that turned out with Natalie.

And then it gets worse. I find out that she usually doesn't get that drunk, that the only reason she was drinking was because she'd just split up with her boyfriend. I start to think that maybe I was the nearest available chunk of manflesh to help her with her self-esteem. After all, thinking back, she was the one who started talking to me. She was very much the pro-active one out of the two of us. But maybe it's just me being paranoid. But then again, as Kurt Cobain once said, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you. Or something. She was supposed to be coming over to see the house today, her and Lauren, but Shaun, making one of his usual flying visits (I honestly don't know why he bothered moving out - he's spent one night out of the past five her, the rest he's spent at his mam's) told me that Ashley had to go to her Nan's and that Lauren thought she'd feel a little weird by herself. The truth? Or just a cover-up to try and disguise the fact that Ashley didn't want to see me? It's not exactly out of character of Shaun to try and cover things up. But, like I said, it might just be me being paranoid. I spend far too much of my life at the minute being paranoid. I think he means well, but as the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If (or when) I see Ashley again, it might allay some of these fears, but until then, I'm being forced by my own paranoid nature to chalk it up to her being drunk/pissed off about being dumped. Which is not something I want to do. Honestly, she's the first girl in over a year who's shown much interest in me (my abortive thing with Kayleigh doesn't even begin to count - I don't even know what -if anything- we had) and naturally I want her to like me (and I don't want to fuck it up like I somehow manage to fuck most of my prospects up - there's a discussion about self-loathing buriedin here somewhere) and her only talking to me because she's drunk and upset isn't going to do much for my ego.

Peace out.

Face-fooked, Saving The Cheerleader & Foreskins

Now, for longer than I probably care to remember, I've been part of what is generally known as social networking. I started out on MySpace and reluctantly defected to Facebook when I realised that everyone (and I mean everyone) I knew was there. Even my internet-phobic sister has succumbed to the lure of Facebook. So far I've managed to get back in touch with dozens of people I had thought lost to the ravages of time. People from secondary school; hell, people from junior school have crawled out of the woodwork, including some that I probably would have preferred to remain buried. But hey, it's only over the internet. It's not like you have to talk to them all the time. I've even made a couple of tentative friends completely at random thanks to the numerous applications Facebook offers. It's been an invaluable tool for staying in touch with people I've met on my trips to visit friends and it's much easier than e-mailing everyone all the time. If you want to know what someone's up to, you just pop over to their page and see. It's a work of genius, it really is.

It also might be a very dangerous tool. Admittedly, it's not as easy to stalk someone as it is on MySpace (where you don't even have to be friends with someone to read their blog, view their pics or stare a their profile for hours on end), but it's somehow all too easy to keep an eye on people. But maybe that's just the world i which we live today. The internet has changed the way we live our lives dramatically. Theoretically, it's now possible for me to do everything (bar work, and if I tried hard enough I could probably even find a job that I could do over the internet) from home. I don't ever have to leave, not even to do the shopping. And now, thanks to Facebook, I can even stay in touch with all my friends without ever having to leave the house. Shit, I could probably do it all from the comfort of my bed. Just think on that.

And while I'm here, let's have a little think about Heroes. The second series starts a week from tonight, still a little pariah over on BBC2, despite the huge ratings it got last year. That said, it took till the third series of The X Files (the last big mainstream sf hit from America) for it to be transferred to the main stage of BBC1, and there the ratings... stayed exactly the same. So does it really matter? Not really. BBC2 is no longer the shabbier, studenty younger brother of BBC1, a home for all the cult and minority interest stuff. That's what they have BBC4 for (BBC3 is obviously for endless repeats of Family Guy and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps). BBC2 is now, somehow, one of the Big 4 (Channel 5, or 'Five' as I think it's called these days never managed to break the Big 4's hold - the Big 4, in case you're wondering being BBC's 1 and 2, ITV (or ITV1 as it's dubbed these days) and Channel 4, all of which cater for slightly different needs), as evidenced by the fact that in the past year we've seen numerous Radio Times covers for shows like Heroes and Torchwood, and although the cover of the Radio Times is no longer the big thing that it used to be, it's still a fairly prestigious thing, like guest starring in Doctor Who in the 80's.

It's a good show (I'm back talking about Heroes now, in case you're a bit lost). I'm currently rewatching the first series (or Volume 1 - Genesis as the show's own mythology has it) thanks to the death of HD and therefore companies like Amazon offloading HD DVD stock like it's going out of fashion. Which it is, to be honest with you. But I have an HD DVD player and a whole bunch of HD DVD's (I also have a Blu-Ray player in my PS3 so I'm not too fussed about HD DVD going the way of Betamax) and I'm not ashamed of that fact. So I bought the HD box set of Heroes, despite the fact I bought the R1 box set of the bog standard DVD's when it first came out (and watched it over the course of a weekend). It's also a show very much of its time. The serial structure of TV (especially American action/drama TV) has been growing in stature since its inception with Babylon 5, although it took 24 and then Lost to really popularise the format. It's definitively post 9/11 (the central story behind Volume 1 has our mismatched heroes trying to foil the destruction of New York), like Battlestar Galactica (and if you need the 9/11 inspirations for that one pointed out your shoe size is probably bigger than your IQ) and like Galactica it takes a bunch of tropes that are so familiar as to be practically archetypes and turns them into living, breathing flesh and blood and then turns the intensity up to eleven. Insert Spinal Tap joke here.

Oviously, being based on the notion of superpowers, Heroes' inspirations are comics, but crucially this is a series which is damn serious. No one wears tights, has secret lairs or even a secret identity. Hiro, a fan favourite, is a nerd like us - in the first episode he's constantly makes allusions to Star Trek and gets his theory of time travel from X Men comics and he toyswith the idea of suiting up and adopting a secret identity, prompting his friend Ando to make a derogatory comment about tights. It's the same mindset which Joss Whedon adopted for Buffy (a superhero story with vampires) and his fingerprints on the initial X Men movie (he was responsible for the 'yellow spandex' line which, at the time seemed like the best way to do a superhero movie - to get it all away from the gaudy four colour splash pages of its origins, until Sam Raimi came along and did a Spider-Man movie so faithful to the spirit of the comic (if not the continuity) that it was as if he'd just ripped up a comic and pasted it to the screen) and it's a mindset that seems to be necessary for a show to receive mainstream acclaim. Galactica is forever being praised in the big outside world but they all downplay that face that, at heart, it's a show about a great big space ship and robots. They focus on the politics and the fact that - good god! - people shag each other on this show! It's the standard way to give sf a good review in the mainstream press (the standard way to give it a bad review is to focus not on the show, but on the fans, who are uniformly portrayed as sad anoraks, exclusively male and lacking social lives) because it essentially says 'this is good, despite the sf' instead of simply saying 'this is good sf' because the general public, that is, those people whose idea of far fetched plots doesn't stretch much further than Dirty Den coming back from the dead in EastEnders, doesn't like sf (or so the accepted logic goes; before the revival of Doctor Who and the massive success it's had, prompting the creation of a least a dozen other fantasy/sf shows, sf on TV was a dead genre, despite the fact that the biggest films are almost exclusively fantasy and sf). And so it is with Heroes. It's much harder, of course, to pretend that Heroes isn't sf than it is with say, Lost or Alias, but it has a lot going for it on that count.It's set in the present day, for a start, which excludes all of that awkward gubbins with spaceships and aliens (speaking of aliens, it's telling that even the new version of Galactica has yet to feature an alien race - they even made the Cylon's a product of human engineering rather than the soliders of a long dead reptillian race as they were in the seventies incarnation) and, a couple of the heroes aside (yes Hiro, I'm looking at you) their powers are pretty much low key - Claire's regeneration, DL's 'phasing' (I'm nicking the terminology from X Men here, because DL is essentially a fly version of Kitty Pryde), even Niki/Jessica's superstrength which is barely remarked upon. It's all stuff that isn't too out there, all stuff that the general audience will already be familiar with. And those powers which aren't are pretty thoroughly explained within the series itself (Peter's human spongey-ness, Hiro's ability to bend time and space).

It's accessible, and that's important these days. It's also a very intelligent program and would stand as a shining example of how smart regular viewers are when you give them a chance. Well, it would, but then a show like Flash Gordon comes along.

So, before I go, the 'foreskins' section of this entry. No, I'm not going to talk about circumcison, but censorship.

You see, this morning I got up and was watching That 70's Show on MTV. Now, it would have been about eight/nine in the morning. And they bleeped out the word foreskin. It's a peculiar double standard, when you can have characters talk about having sex but not mentio the word 'foreskin'. It also brings to mind that song by Wheatus, 'Teenage Dirtbag', which features the line 'her boyfriend's a dick' but then obscures the next line, or part of it anyway, which is 'he brings a gun to school'. Can you guess which part they censor? As James Toback once said, if you're goingto censor something, at least censor someon'e head getting lopped off. It's a strange world in which we live where you can see people getting killed on TV, but an erect penis (and certainly shots of actual vaginal penetration) is still strictly verboten. It's a depressing world, actually. You get the impression that people's priorities are a little fucked up.

And before I go, don't go and see Awake, that film with Anakin Skywalker and Sue Storm in. It's rubbish. I might have felt offended if it was a TV special. As a film it was just diabolical. Peace out.

Charting The New Frontier

So, yes. I finally did it. I moved out. And it only took me five years to recover from the last time I tried it. Now, if memory serves, at this point, having lived away from home for about six weeks, give or take, when I was living over Gateshead I was in the midst of a terrible depression. Call it homesickness if you want, but I think it was something deeper than that. Am I experiencing that here? A little, but I'm depressed anyway (usual bollocks, but this time involving a completely different girl called Natalie - hey, at least I'm consistent, as Stef is with peeps called Chris, so I am with girls called Natalie. It's a motif.) and at least here I'm not tiptoeing around a nutty closet lesbian.

So, a bizarre side-effect of the move was that I for whatever reason ended up watching the first six series of Red Dwarf. You know, the good ones, before everything went off the boil. Not in order though. It was something like 1, 4, 5, 6, 2, 3, which serves only to highlight the massively varying quality between the series. Series 6 for example, for all it's Emmy award winning glory and shiny special effects is a big fat overweight series well on it's way to comedy heaven. The characters have long since ceased to be anything more than a collection of comedy tics (Lister with his curry and questionable hygiene, Kryten and his Space Corps directive and groinal socket jokes). True, it still has it's moments, but somewhere during Series 2 and Series 3 it stopped being a sitcom set in space and became a space show that happened to be a comedy. And not a very good one at that. Somewhere during Series 5 the quality just tails off and the much-vaunted 'Back To Reality', despite some intriguing ideas doesn't develop them enough for it to be good sf or is funny enough to be a good comedy. The Cat's Duane Dibbley character in particular is a lazy anorak joke that goes on far too long (and they had the tenacity to resurrect it the following season in 'Emohawk'). 'Holoship' is a good idea and has some hilarious moments (it's telling that most of the funny stuff in these twilight years is the product of Chris Barrie, it's also telling that from the moment he leaves the series in Series 7 the entire enterprise goes into nosedive) but again it's a schizophrenic turn - it doesn't know whether it wants to be a funny sf show or a sitcom that just happens to be set in outer space. This effect leaves most of the episodes feeling malnourished - the thirty minute mark is not long enough to introduce, develop and utilise a decent sf idea, as seen in 'Demons And Angels' for example. The first two series were essentially sitcom - the characters barely even moved out of the confines of their three stock sets, akin to Blackadder (now there was a show which knew its strengths and played them to the hilt) and whatever sf related plot turned up (echoes from the future, a subservient mechanoid, Holly getting replaced by a superior computer) were usually perfunctory enough to be dealt with quite nicely in the time allowed and in the manner the should have been; as a framework for the jokes to hang off.

I think it might be the case with any show that as time goes on, things become more and more formuliac. It happened with Friends, it happened with Cheers (and that show is perhaps the finest sitcom to emerge from America since Bewitched, speaking of Bewitched, that didn't so much become more formulaic as time went on but started out with a very strict formula and stuck with it), and it happened with Red Dwarf. By Series 6 you were guaranteed a Space Corps directive joke, a humourous reference to curry, some amusing metaphor for Rimmer's hair/Kryten's head and at least one fashion reference from the Cat. It obviously happened because Grant and Naylor were responding to popular demand. If one Space Corps joke got a big laugh, they were plainly going to try it again. Just witness the 'Tales Of The Riverbank: The Next Generation' conversation that tried and failed to top the hilariously insane conversation about Wilma Flintstone.

I think I might be being a bit harsh here. After all, watching the entire six series in the space of a week, I must have found something in them that I enjoyed. It's just I enjoyed some more than others. Peculiarly, going off conventional wisdom (ooh, there's that phrase again) the 'classic' episodes ('Backwards', 'Back To Reality', 'Gunmen Of The Apocalypse') were among my least favourite, while 'Meltdown', often cited as the series nadir was damn funny (perhaps, in that case, with the advent of bad taste comedy like Family Guy and South Park, we're more attuned to the comedy notion of Ghandi as a man in a nappy and Queen Victoria as an assassin). 'Holoship' especially because it had the lovely Jane Horrocks in, as well as that exhange between Lister and Don Warrington, would also be high on my list. But for me, the series' high point has to be Series 2. At that point, it was still true to its roots, while the kinks that had marred Series 1 (nothing serious, just the usual problems that need to be ironed out on any series) have been worked out.

Which brings us to Star Trek: Voyager. That unloved son of the Trek canon. Where to start? Okay, controversial opinion here, but, given that aside from DS9 (and that series is so unlike any other Trek it might be worth simply putting it in a category of its own) Voyager is quite good. Certainly as Space Opera goes, it's in the top ten of shows from the nineties. DS9 and Babylon 5 obviously top the chart, followed by TNG (which I hated as a kid and which I've learned to love much more as a adult). Stargate didn't really hit its stride until its third season, Andromeda was the televisual equivalent of laxative, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica had the good grace to start only once Voyager had finished (and will no doubt come up in a discussion of Enterprise, should I ever do one, which I probably will), leaving only the true might of Farscape to challenge it, and even then, that was only in Voyager's later years.

So why is Voyager so unloved? Does it have anything to do with the female captain? It's certainly an intriguing suggestion and bears looking at with the knowledge that a surprising amount of Trek fans, especially in America, are massively right-wing. Surprising given Trek's liberal lefty approach to politics that is, not America's right-wing leanings. You only have to look at the fact that no Trek series has yet done a story that addresses the gay issue. Sure, you had 'The Outcast' on TNG, a dreadful piece of polemic by Jeri Taylor, a writer who plainly had no understanding or empathy for sf, but that shot itself in the foot by casting a woman in the role of Riker's supposedly androgynous love interest. Had they cast a man, it might have meant something. As it was, it was obviously to the entire audience that she was a woman underneath all the make-up so that made it 'safe' because any notions of 'deviant' sexuality were purely associational at best. And DS9 did 'Rejoined' in which Jadzia Dax becomes involved with her former lover, only as they are both Trills (and I've never been able to get over that species name, given that it's the same as a type of bird food), they were in different bodies at the time, one female, one male and now they are both female. The episode does go some way to addressing the whole issue, doing what Trek as the Offical National Metaphor of America does best, disguising the issue so that instead of the stigma they receive being because that if they get reacquianted now they will be a same-sex couple, but rather they will have broken the Trill taboo of getting involved with partners from a past life, although why this should be a taboo, I have no idea, and anyway, it didn't stop Ezri from bonking Worf a few months after Jadzia's death. Or does the taboo only apply to Trills? You might think it should be the other way round. The possible psychological trauma for Worf (for example) would be much greater than for Ezri, or the Dax symbiont because as a joined Trill, she is used to living different lives, while for Worf, it's almost as if there's a lot of his wife in there and he's still in love with Jadzia Dax, while Ezri Dax is an entirely different person, but Ezri getting down and dirty with him might send the wrong signals.


But that's a bit of a digression. We were discussing female captains. Women are psychologically unsuited to command, or so the final episode of the original series claimed back in 1969. And true to form, the network got cold feet about a woman captain (Voyager's main selling point) and we almost had Nigel Havers in command of the Voyager. Doubtless the female role would have been transferred to first office. But what we have in Janeway is something special. Generally, women on TV fall into three main categories: Maiden, mother and crone. Two of Voyager's female cast, Janeway and B'Elanna, don't fall into either of these (at least not at first, a lot of Janeway's mothering instincts come out with regard to Kes, and especially with Seven) and that in and of itself is a huge achievement. Additionally, managing to make Janeway a recognisable woman without falling into the normal trap of writing for a man and then just sticking a pair of comedy breasts on (as often happened to Tasha Yar in the early days of TNG) or making her weak in respect to the men under her command or making her a ball-breaker in the Jane Tennyson mould. Janeway is recognisably a woman in the same way that Sisko is recognisably a man, but roles for the, shall we say 'mature' woman, on TV tend to either the caring mother or the shrewish. Or the slapper. I make no judgements but point you to a certain cast member from 'Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country' who gained a certain amount of subsequent fame in a certain HBO TV show with the words 'city' and 'sex' in the title.

It's a serious achievement, even in the nineties. An something that should be applauded. The producers even had the courage to make Janeway flawed. She does things that Picard would neverhave even considered. In the fifth season opener, she's retreated to her quarters and is brooding. Has been for days. She second-guesses herself. And she's allowed to, because she's alone in the Delta Quadrant. If Picard ever doubted himself, he could just pick up the phone to Starfleet Command and get some advice from the guest admiral of the week. Janeway (a lot like Kirk before her, although you suspect that Kirk would have probably found a way to destroy the Caretaker's array that stranded them in the Delta Quadrant in the first place and get them home, all in the space of fifty minutes - I doubt he would have let any of that 70,000 light years from home shit get in his way) makes choices because she has to and the only people she can really confide in are Tuvok and Chakotay. So, a good captain.

What of the rest of the crew?

It's here we begin to slip up. Chakotay is as wooden as you can actually get without becoming a two by four (although those occasions when he does try, basically those scripts he likes which sadly aren't that plentiful, he can hit his marks with the best of them - I'd like to see him share a screen with Patrick Stewart, either Stewart would blow him out of the water or Beltran would be forced to raise his game and that would be worth paying good money for). It doesn't help that his character is plainly rubbish. It's odd that a series so generally respectful as Star Trek should think it's okay to produce a character who's transparently written as a generic Native American/Mayan/South American Ethnicity Of The Week. His spirituality is a dreadful melting pot of whatever the story needs that week.

Tuvok is essentially Spock Redux. Over the course of seven years you never find out anything about him. Sure, you find out about his wife and his kids (a little bit anyway) and you find out about his experience on the Excelsior and a bit about his prior relationship with Janeway (a relationship that generally gone sidelined and ignored in favour of the romance between Janeway and Chakotay that some of the writers were trying to work in but which was ignored by everyone else). But you never found out about him as a person. What made him tick? It didn't help that he was written as a generic 'man without emotions' most of the time and Tim Russ had to inject whatever personality he could purely by means of gestures and suchlike.

Neelix. The less said about Neelix the better. You'd think that after Quark, the DS9 comic relief who worked so much better as a dramatic character (and, indeed, after introducing the Ferengi themselves onto TNG as the new Big Bad before deciding they worked so much better as comic relief) that they would stop trying to pigeonhole characters before they've had a chance to settle down and find their feet. Ethan Phillips is a fine actor, and many of his performances are exceptional (especially given that he's beneath a mask that looks like the bastard son of a baboon, a leopard and a big bag of pus) unfortunately, most of the episodes where he is the notional star are duds purely because Neelix as a comic character does not work. Think about it: Here is a man whose entire family have been wiped out in a war, who has spent God knows how long wandering about, just about eking out a living by trading. Does this sound like comedy gold to you? Because it certainly doesn't to me. Whereas on DS9 they eventually accepted Quark's role (he still got the comedy stuff, but DS9 was a much grimmer series than Voyager so he got his fair share of heavy stuff to) Neelix would veer wildly about depending on who was writing him, often in the space of a single scene. And whoever had the idea of pairing him up with Naomi Wildman should be shot. Neelix doing caring and paternal is enough to make any puke.

Harry Kim is, like Tuvok, a blank slate really. You can imagine they were running short a character for the regular cast (and it you're being particularly cruel, an ethnic minority) and the notes for Kim simply read 'Ensign - Fresh out of the Academy' because he's not so much a character, more someone to stand there so the other actor in the scene has someone to talk to. Garrett Wang is a competent enough actor (in fact, I would go so far as to say that no regular in Trek, certainly the post TNG iterations, has been a bad actor - it's too high profile a job for that, although some of the guest cast have been absolutely appalling - naming no names but a certain recurring Vulcan engineer springs immediately to mind), but, like Travis in Enterprise, Kim's character seems to have gotten lost down the back of Rick Berman's desk.

Tom Paris and B'Elanna. The great love story of Trek. No, really. I'm not bullshitting you here. Forget about Dax and Worf or whatever it was that Trip and T'Pol had (and the Kira/Odo love story? - you can fuck off right now, the entire beauty of that storyline was that Odo's love was unrequited, once Kira developed feelings back, it lost all its magic - let's face it, how many cases of unrequited love do we have these days? Not enough). Tom and B'Elanna are where it's at. They never did a lot on it, but that's what is so beautiful about it. It happens naturally, from them finding out they fancy each other, to admitting they fancy each other, to dating, all the way through to getting married and having a baby. They fight, sure. But they always make up. And because it's not a constant detail whenever we see them as it sometimes was with Dax and Worf it feels real. The main problem with Tom as a character was that his arc (the made good) was pretty much over and done with by the end of 'Caretaker', leading to odd throwbacks like 'Thirty Days' where Tom The Rebel suddenly resurfaced, seemingly purely for the purposes of shaking things up.

Kes. Hmm. In every Trek series there is a character who, on the surface, has a massive amount of potential but for whatever reason, never pans out. In the original series it was McCoy (despite being the third leading man he was never really given his chance to shine, although there was never any real chance for it, the way TV worked in those days, you had your hero and his sidekicks, Uhura was also someone who you occasionally got tantalisingly glimpses at and deserved far more screen time than she got), in TNG it was Deanna Troi, in DS9 it was Jake (amazingly the only human civilian who's been a regular) and in Enterprise it was Reed who got little more to do than stand around whingeing and making sarcastic comments. On Voyager it was Kes. Initially hamstrung by her relationship with the overprotective Neelix (and I'm not even going to go into the whole potential cradle snatching scenario, just to say that when Kes and Neelix are together, she celebrates her second birthday), the only times when Jennifer Lien got a chance to shine was when she wasn't playing the usual Kes (c.f. 'Before and After' and 'Warlord'). She got stuck in the same rut that Troi had on TNG for a while, popping up to the bridge once an episode or so and making asinine comments. While Troi eventually escaped this (although it took her till Season 6), on Voyager they decided to cut their losses and replaced Kes after Season 3 and replaced her with...

Seven Of Nine. Ah. Can you smell a desperate grab for ratings? Still, if you overlook Jeri Ryan's obvious... attributes and the fact that her uniform seems to consist solely of variously coloured skintight catsuits, Seven is a good character, and for once the writing staf aren't afraid to use that character. Too often in Seasons 1-3, Voyager comes across a planet, some stuff happens then they go on their way (and all too often, it often happened to guest stars - they do a Pon Farr episode, 'Blood Fever' and they hire a guest star to play the Vulcan undergoing the mating urge - how much better would it have been for it to have been Tuvok undergoing it, especially with his wife being 70,000 light years away). No real attempt was made to tie it into the characters, or even the overall arc of the series. Only the od episode, like 'The 37's' was really about the need to get home. With the introduction of Seven, they started generating stories that sprung out of the characters, well, I say characters, but it is really just Seven. It helps that Ryan is a very god actress (you only need to watch 'One', where she spends much of the time on screen alone and manages to hold your interest, or 'Infintie Regress' where she switchies between characters in less than a blink of an eye). The same is true of the Doctor, the other feather in Voyager's cap. Played by Robert Picardo as someone constantly on the verge of smacking someone out, the Doctor is the irascible jewel in Voyager's crown (and, were there any justice in the world, Seven and the Doctor would have ended up involved with each other). Like Harry, the Doctor starts off as a blank slate, but the writers actually do things with the Doctor. He's Voyager's Data substitute (although Data himself was just a Spock substitute, albeit with his goals reversed, while Spock distances himself from his human heritage, Data wants to become more human) and as such is guaranteed all the usual episodes like the 'first love' that Trek has down pat by now.

And maybe that's the problem people had with Voyager. By this point, Trek as a franchise had become very moribound. There were two series running, Voyager was designed to fill the gap as soon as TNG ended, there was a movie at the pictures every two or three years... Everything had become so predictable. While DS9 (like Voyager, a series that took a while to find its feet - in fact, both DS9 and Voyager didn't really find themselves until their third season and didn't produce a definitive season until Season 4, and each with fresh impetus - DS9's war with the Klingons and Voyager introducing Seven of Nine as well as featuring the Borg themselves, not really having been seen on TV since TNG's 'Descent' four years earlier) took its own path and did what it felt like doing (primarily due to Rick Berman leaving it alone and letting Ira Steven Behr and his team get on with it), Voyager was hamstrung by a number of factors that were inherent at the beginning of the series and they didn't take into account the lessons learned from TNG and the growing pains of DS9. That said, TNG didn't find its feet until well into its third year, nor did Enterprise (while back in the sixties, as the original Trek was entering its third series, everything was starting to go horribly wrong, c.f. Spock's Brain).

It's a funny old world. Voyager survived as long as it did simply because there was an expectaton for Star Trek (that and the fact of its placement as the flagship show of Paramount's TV station UPN guaranteed that no matter what ratings it got, it would survive) while Enterprise was crippled by the same expectation. When it comes down to it, Voyager is my least favourite Trek series, have to admit it. It would be Enterprise, but Seasons 3 and 4 of that show are up there with the best of what DS9 has to offer. But when Voyager was good (see Seasons 4 and 5, plus most of Season 7 until they get to that hideous finale) it stood up well against everything else that wasn't Trek. Had it not been Trek, it probably wouldn't have lasted as long as it did, which is a sad indicator of today's televisual climate when perfectly good quality shows aren't given the chances that they deserve, but it would perhaps have bee in Voyager's best interests. Had the show been forced to fight - and I mean really fight, facing a threat of cancellation every year - the producers and staff might have been pushed to do something truly great, rather than occasionally stumbling across it by accident. So, in conclusion, a good series (certainly one that deserves a better reputation than it currently has) but one which, given the odd kick up the arse, could have been a great one. After all, look what the desire to prove themselves did for Behr et al over at DS9. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a wasted opportunity (shows like Firefly or Wonderfalls being cut down in their prime through lack of understanding or empathy, that is a wasted opprtunity) but were it a student it would probably pass, but have a chastising 'could do better'.

Peace out.

The House That Marky Built

Yes. It seems like I, the last great advocate of living with parents, will soon be moving out. To a flat of my very own, well, aside from the fact that I'll be sharing it with a lad I work with, it will still be my flat. He's just a lodger there. A vital lodger because there's no way I can afford the rent and the bills and still be able to feed myself.

It has sort of come out of the blue. The Guv mentioned it one day and it has just snowballed from there. One simple suggestion from her and it's become reality. I've filled in the application for today so we should be moving in by the end of the month. It's kinda scary, given that I'm nearly 27 and aside from those six months I spent living in Gateshead I've never lived on my own, but it's something I think I need to do. And it's exciting. I'll actually have a living room for living in. I will no longer be living out of my bedroom. I'll have an entire house to fill with books and DVDs.

But it's unfurnished. And how expensive are some things? I've been lucky in that pretty much everyone has been donating odds and ends (a table here, a bookcase there) and Florence still has a lot of stuff kicking around. My Gran's old dining room table, for instance, will be travelling with me, as will the old freezer and a bunch of other stuff. But I need a bed and a whole load of bookcases. Beds (along with tables and sideboards and sofas) are ludicrously expensive, for what they are.

So I got a loan from the bank to cover the bond and some furniture. God, I feel so grown up now. Peace out.