featuring the episodes PK Tech Girl and That Old Black Magic

The Farscape DVDs lose a little steam with this volume, as the episode commentaries make their departure. Without the commentaries, the extras section of the disc is rather thin, with the handful of photos and conceptual drawings and another EPK, there’s nothing to really sink your teeth into. That’s a shame, really, because the episodes on this disc are probably the best of the series so far. The actors are hitting their stride, the show seems to have found its tone, and things get interesting. (more…)

Containing both the original Doctor Who And The Daleks movie and its sequel, Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., as well as a bonus DVD with the interesting Kevin Davies documentary Dalekmania, Anchor Bay’s Doctor Who DVD box set is a nice little budget-friendly way to get the whole Peter Cushing-as-Doctor Who experience in one place. My comments on the DVD of the original movie have been recorded elsewhere, so I’ll focus on the other two discs here. (more…)

This third set opens on an incredibly dull note with Collision Course, a story which attempts to be a deep examination of faith vs. logic (but isn’t). It doesn’t help that it boasts some of Martin Landau’s hammiest acting in the entire series, but also has the intriguing concept of a situation where the crew of Moonbase Alpha may need to deliberately reproduce the kind of massive nuclear blast that sent the moon plunging into deep space to begin with. Things pick up immensely with Death’s Other Dominion, starring an impossibly young (but still, as always, thunderously-voiced) Brian Blessed as the somewhat shady de-facto leader of a doomed society. (more…)

I’ve always had a strong memory of this one for some reason. Hey, when you’re a kid and you see a Doctor Who story about a giant squid measuring five miles across, it stays with you for some reason. Or at least it stayed with me. (more…)

featuring the episodes Back and Back and Back to the Future and Thank God It’s Friday…Again

According to Ben Browder’s commentary track, this disc features the first two “black tee eps” – a show in which Crichton trades his white T-shirt for a black one. This would seem to be an utterly trivial piece of production info, except that Browder and others soon began to associate the black tees with the Farscape stories with a particularly strange and/or dark tone. Back And Back And Back To The Future certainly achieves this, but I’m less sure that Thank God It’s Friday…Again warrants such status. But hey, it was early in the show’s run, so there were still kinks to be worked out. (more…)