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Red Dwarf (IX): Back to Earth

Nine years have passed since the crew of Red Dwarf saved their ship from destruction at the hands of a matter-destroying microbial virus. In the meantime, Kristine Kochanski has apparently died in an airlock accident, Holly was offlined due to a water tank malfunction and the aging crewmembers have had to face the probability of them dying in deep space due to dwindling supplies. However, a sequence of unusual events seems them return to Earth...and gives Lister hope of a reunion with Kochanski.

Back in 1999, Red Dwarf VIII aired. Although the most critically-lambasted season to date, it also matched Red Dwarf VII's extremely high ratings (well over six million for some episodes, unheard of for a sitcom airing on BBC2). Fans could be excused for expecting the show to continue for many years to come. Instead, they got nothing.

The reasons why the show went off the air seem obtuse, but it seems to have been a combination of the enormous workload on Doug Naylor for writing and producing the series almost single-handedly (after the departure of his co-creator Rob Grant after Season 6) and his insistence, likely not coincidentally, on making a Red Dwarf feature film instead. Funding had apparently been sourced for a larger-budgeted theatrical theatre, only for this to fall through at the last moment. Additional funding was secured but again collapsed. By the time Naylor had gotten tired of this dance and gone back to the BBC, the BBC had lost interest. More bemusingly, they remained resolutely uninterested even after Doctor Who returned in 2005 and became a monster hit, and the BBC started looking for other genre TV ideas (such as Merlin) whilst ignoring their other proven, long-running SF success.

It fell to cable channel Dave to give the show its long-awaited resurrection. Made with what initially appeared to be a reasonable budget, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (the "IX" is a retcon, applied solely to make the ordering of the seasons make more sense on streaming services and on media releases) was a surprise hit for Dave and led to the commissioning of further series. Critically, however, Back to Earth was mauled on release in 2009 and time has not been much kinder to it.

The mini-season starts promisingly, with some solid Rimmer/Lister gags in the bunk room on Red Dwarf. You may be wondering how the crew survived the events of the Red Dwarf VIII cliffhanger and how Rimmer is back again as a hologram and what happened to the hundreds of crewmembers who evacuated the ship...and you can go on wondering, as you'll get no answers here (to be fair, the wiki has a reasonable guess). More important to the plot is that Kochanski is apparently dead and Holly decommissioned due to a malfunction. There's some very solid CGI at work here, including some half-decent virtual sets and an excellent CG model of Red Dwarf itself, and the show's first move into high-definition is reasonably impressive.

The plot kicks in when the ship's science officer Katerina Bartokovsky is resurrected and promptly decides to retire Rimmer, whom she deems has failed in his mission to keep Lister sane. A sequence of events results in our familiar crew travelling to a parallel universe where their lives exist solely in a television series called Red Dwarf. In an increasingly metafictional story, the crew meet one of the actors playing them on the show and have to find their creator before he decides to write a final episode in which everyone dies, which would kill them in their reality as well.

This metafictional idea isn't necessarily a bad idea, and in fact has been explored in Red Dwarf before, particularly in the likes of Better Than Life and Back to Reality, but those episodes were co-written with Rob Grant. The Grant-Naylor partnership made those meta episodes work, but Naylor by himself struggles. Especially weird is that he latches onto the idea of basing some story ideas on the 1982 movie Blade Runner, a very fine film, but also quite an old one by that point with no guarantee that the general audience knew what he was referencing. The special also relies a lot on knowing that Craig Charles plays a character on soap opera Coronation Street and knowing whom some of the incidental actors were on that show, which dates it painfully. It's also not particularly funny, the direction (also by Naylor) is not great and the pacing is terrible. The lack of a laughter track also hurts the show's timing, with the actors visibly struggling at times with not getting any feedback.

However, the story does perk up whenever Lister has to confront the spectre of Kochanski's death and the parallel world giving him the opportunity to possibly meet her again. Red Dwarf is at its best when it mixes comedy with pathos, something it forgot in the last couple of seasons, and it does bring that element back here with some great scenes of emotional intensity for Craig Charles, which he rises to.

Beyond that, the special is, well, not very special. Some good ideas and great vfx are undermined by poor storytelling. Sophie Winkleman as Katerina is saddled with a terrible accent and sound mixing that makes her unintelligible in some sequences. For every joke that lands, there are at least three that do not.

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (**½) is not totally without merit, with some impressive visual set-pieces and at least a few gags that land well. But poor pacing and direction undermine its better parts. After this special, fans started pondering if it was better for the show to simply end forever. Fortunately, the Dave channel had other ideas.

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Red Dwarf VIII

Due to a bit of a cock-up in the nanotechnology department, the missing mining ship Red Dwarf has been recreated, along with its thousand plus crew. Lister, the Cat, Kryten and Kochanski find themselves locked up for misuse of classified information and are joined in the slammer by the ship's own version of Arnold Rimmer, restored along with the rest of the crew. Lister and the team have to work out how survive life inside and work out how to escape, or if they even want to.

The history of British science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf is pretty well-known at this point. A patchy but promising first season was followed by a tightly-written and brilliantly funny second season which overcame ropey production values. The third, fourth and fifth seasons saw steadily increasing production values and ever-more-clever science fiction ideas merging with eye-wateringly hilarious scripts and just a touch of character pathos, to create an "imperial period" most TV shows can only dream about. The sixth season was almost as good, but behind-the-scenes tensions between writers Doug Naylor and Rob Grant made it a difficult season to write and shoot, and a growing overreliance on running gags and returning characters and references. A four-year break, due to some of the actors having other commitments or legal problems, and the writing team divorcing for good, was followed by the weakest season yet.

Red Dwarf VII was, with the best will in the world, something of a creative misfire, with Doug Naylor both overstretched in writing or co-writing the entire season with less-experienced writing partners (the idea to lighten the load on him was undercut by him having to rewrite the scripts by those less-experienced teammates, negating the advantages in the first place). The departure of Chris Barrie as Rimmer was a blow, but the addition of Chloe Annett to the cast as Kochanski worked much better than expected. However, the season-long subplot of Kryten being jealous of Kochanski was horrendous and kept dragging down even the better episodes of the season, and the overreliance on running gags and returning concepts was an even bigger problem than in the sixth season.

Red Dwarf VIII starts with Naylor completely revamping the premise of the show, a bold move which was probably necessary for the purposes of trying to find some fresh ideas. The season opens with our regular heroes' ship, the redoubtable Starbug which they've been living in since the end of Season 5, being blown into a million pieces as it crash-lands on Red Dwarf in one of the show's more spectacular set pieces. The return of the recurring cast of Season 1 is initially a great thing, giving our heroes more characters to bounce off, and the idea they've been wasting time and screwing around quite irresponsibly and have to answer for this is interesting, for the five seconds the show spends on it before instead dumping the characters in jail for the rest of the season on decidedly spurious grounds.

The "Red Dwarf crew in the slammer" concept is good but not, I fear, good enough to fill eight episodes. Pacing this season is completely out the window with each episode relying on a few Rimmer & Lister bunk scenes to make them work. This was one of the stronger elements of the first few seasons, eventually phased out due to Craig Charles and Chris Barrie getting on one another's nerves, and here returns because Charles and Barrie had reconnected on the convention circuit and found themselves in a better place. To be fair, these conversations are quite amusing and, though not a patch on the imperial period's exchanges (especially the episode-long laugh-fest that was Marooned in Season 3), are often the highlight of their episodes.

The limitation of the concept is rapidly exposed by the fact that although this season has eight episodes, it only has five stories. The opening episode is split into three parts and a later episode in two, with only three stand-alone episodes resulting, and these struggle to move beyond standard prison cliches. All the gags you'd expect from a lesser series about not picking up the soap, being desperate for any hint of female company etc are here, no cliche is overturned and no long-hanging fruit is left unpicked. The question of why Red Dwarf would do a prison season when it didn't have even a tenth of the wit or charm as say, dedicated prison sitcom Porridge arises, and is left unanswered.

The season suffers hugely from wasted potential. Captain Hollister (Mac McDonald) was a fine comic character in the first two seasons and he gets by on his charisma here, but he is the butt of far too many fat jokes. Fair enough that apparently McDonald himself relished making the jokes far harsher than they had been in the original scripts, but one episode of non-stop fat jokes is maybe pushing it, and by the end of eight you'll have tuned right out of them. Most of the other original cast were unavailable (Selby and Chen get one scene and then never reappear) and Kochanski has been back for a season already (though recast) so the benefit of reuniting our main crewmembers with the OG crew is pretty much lost after the first episode. The return of the original Holly (Norman Lovett) is initially welcome and he gets a few good laughs, but quickly the same problem that caused Holly's departure in the first place reasserts itself: with Kryten around, Holly's standard role as a font of exposition is no longer necessary, and with the addition of Kryten and Kochanski and the returning ship full of characters, it's a struggle for Holly to get any screentime, let alone lines. The fact there are also two Hollies around (the original, left powered down when Red Dwarf was stolen, and a new version rebuilt by Kryten's nanodroids) is an interesting idea thrown up in the first story and instantly forgotten.

There's also little or no interest by Hollister or the other crewmembers in what Lister and co. have been up to for the prior two centuries, which beggars belief. In fact, basic plot logic, already under severe strain in Season 7, goes out the window completely here. Naylor didn't seem to consider that having just four characters stuck in a tiny ship constantly scavenging for supplies was a source of tension, but having (at least) a thousand characters on a voluminous and newly-rebuilt-and-repaired five-mile-long ship is a massive advantage that can overcome almost all threats instantly. The idea of having our regulars joining the suicide squad of the prisoners, going head-first into danger in return for some prison privileges, is great, but ceases being a major plot point pretty quickly.

In terms of the episodes, Back in the Red starts off quite well but by its third part has become almost unwatchable. Cassandra is a potential classic, and easily the strongest episode of the season, with the introduction of an AI that can predict the future with 100% accuracy causing havoc as Rimmer tries to out-logic her. Krytie TV is simply the worst episode of the first eight seasons of Red Dwarf and a strong contender for the worst one ever. The inexplicably extended two-parter Pete has some good ideas (the recurring gag of Rimmer and Lister being dragged repeatedly before the Captain for increasingly insane reasons can actually be quite funny) but mostly appalling execution, with too much toilet humour - albeit of the dinosaur variety - and some vfx calls the show is only barely able to answer.

The season finale, Only the Good..., is promising with Rimmer travelling to a mirror universe where everything is reversed and he gets everything he ever wanted, with the inevitable comedown being quite crushing. However, the cliffhanger ending is inexplicable and weird, and this time the audience had to wait even longer for the resolution (technically they still are, since it has never been answered).

Red Dwarf VIII (**½) starts strong with a lot of potential, but generally fails to execute. The much-improved production values and at-last decent CGI seem to have come at the expense of characterisation, laughs and pathos, with lowest-common-denominator humour and predictable plot twists. The season is helped by a strong guest cast, including Geraldine McEwan and a young Graham McTavish, and Cassandra and Only the Good... at least have some good ideas.

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Metro: Exodus

2035. The political struggle for control of the Moscow Metro, where ten thousand survivors from the 2013 nuclear war that ended the old world live with their descendants, has stabilised with an uneasy peace. For Artyom, the hero of the battle at D6, it's an opportunity to follow his dream of finding out what's happened in the world beyond the city limits. The discovery of anomalous radio signals and the capture of an armoured steam train, the Aurora, gives Artyom and his friends their chance to abandon the closed-in world of the Metro for the open skies of the world beyond...and their own, unique dangers.

Metro: Exodus is the third game in the Metro series of video games, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and based on the novels by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky (currently living outside of Russia due to his opinions of the current political situation). It was preceded by Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013), with remastered versions of both games later released as Metro Redux. Metro: Exodus is something a mild reset of the series, removing detailed references to the events of the first two games in favour of the story at hand, and a new gameplay format.

The basics of the game are more or less unchanged. You play Artyom, a survivor of the nuclear war who has learned the hard way how to survive in the Metro. The game is ostensibly a first-person shooter, though mild survival and crafting mechanics are present and there is a strong focus on stealth. An opening section in Moscow is very much linear business as usual, until you and your allies (many of them recurring from the first two games) find a train heading out of the city and realise you can escape to the open countryside, and find out what the hell happened to the rest of the world.

From here the game adopts a structure more akin to the original Far Cry, with sequential, large and open-ish maps with a primary objective but various sub-objectives you can explore along the way, and with freedom of action in how you approach each mission. You can rush each area by doing the main objective ASAP, but going off the beaten path to explore side-areas will reveal more loot, upgrades, lore and subplots. As with the first two games there is a hidden moral metre, and behaving in a more moral and enlightened way (minimising kills, sparing surrendering enemies etc) will open up new branches in the storyline. Allies you may drive away by adopting a murder-hobo mentality will instead stay on, and provide more support in later missions.

This new approach is refreshing, allowing the introduction of open-world elements without going full open-world with a single massive map on which the whole game takes place and the main storyline takes a back seat for hours or tens of hours at a time. This structure instead allows for a degree of exploration and freedom but not too long before you have to progress the main story, which is quite enjoyable.

This is basically the Road Trip from Hell, made the worse because you don't have full control over your route (you need to stay on the rails, obviously) and even a minor setback can have massive consequences. The Russian rail services ceased to exist twenty-two years before the game takes place, so if a mudslide has washed half a kilometre of track into the Volga, you're screwed and have to go back and find another route (and hope that is passable). But it is fun, as you can repair to the train between missions and chat to other characters, building up relationships and following subplots. The characters in the Metro series have always been a lot of fun and catching up with them here is enjoyable. The main exception is Anna, Artyom's previous girlfriend turned wife, who was a formidable fighter with a sharp sense of humour in previous games and here is a bit too squeeing over Artyom, which feels odd.

Exploration is a lot of fun, with your growing equipment collection allowing for better exploration and detection of possible supplies. Some of the maps provide you with vehicles for exploration, including boats and buggies, which are an enjoyable change of pace. Each map, separated sometimes by thousands of kilometres from the last one, has its own set of characters and factions, making the game sometimes feel like an episodic road trip TV show, which is enjoyable. Making sure you close off the subplots in each region before moving on can be a bit hit-and-miss, and the game sometimes can be unclear on what you should or should not be doing. I had a rather limited experience on the Caspian Sea level, for example, by inadvertently killing what turned out to be a major NPC during an early scuffle, closing off a bunch of options for resolving that particular crisis more peacefully.

Combat remains solid, and mostly unchanged from prior games. Weapon selection is solid and a frontal assault is usually possible as long as you don't get swamped by superior numbers (and can re-arm quickly). Stealth is more more satisfying, however, with silent knife throws, critical takedowns and silenced weapons all providing excellent opportunities for stealth operatives. Lethal and non-lethal options are available in most cases, and going for the non-lethal approach can result in enemies letting you live in thanks rather than trying to kill you later on. There are granular outcomes to your choices in the game that are not immediately obvious, meaning you find yourself considering your options more carefully in a more traditional cartoon sandbox where mass violence is always rewarded positively.

The game does struggle reconciling its linear past with its new, more freeform present. The Volga and Caspian levels are huge and open to explore, but the ultra-linear Taiga level, a corridor pretending to be an open riverbank, is a little weird, and feels designed to shuffle you between cutscenes. The game feels better when it's fully embracing the open-world or when it places you in tight confines once again; a late-game visit to another Russian city with a Metro feels pleasingly nostalgic rather than irritating by snatching the open world away again. A greater irritation is that cutscenes do tend to go on a bit too long, and sometimes repeat information that is redundant. The English-language voice acting can also be a bit of a mixed bag, and hardcore veterans of the series may find the decision to completely ignore some major story and lore ramifications from the first two games a bit odd. Newcomers will be completely at ease, though.

The main game itself is solid, but these days the game also ships with its DLC. The first DLC, The Two Colonels, explains the backstory to a character mentioned but MIA in the main game. It's quite linear and very short, but it does have some interesting gameplay ideas and some great dialogue. The second DLC, Sam's Story, is huge by the standards of most such expansions. It adds the city of Vladivostok to the roster of locations, with your character exploring a fairly large area on foot and by boat, aligning with different factions and searching for vital supplies that will help your ambition of crossing the Pacific Ocean and finding out what happened to America. One of the best maps in the game and some strong NPC characterisation makes this a fine slice of the Metro series.

Overall, Metro: Exodus (****½) is a fine addition to the series. It changes things up at a point when they could have become stale. The gunplay is great, the stealth is excellent and the story is solid, with the subtle way the game handles morality, choice and consequence being refreshing. At around 30 hours (including the DLC), the game gives a solid amount of content without being too stuffed with filler.

The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, Mac and Linux. A sequel, Metro 2039 which sees a stranger arrive in Moscow, is due for release in 2027.

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Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

Dick Simnel, a man who knows exactly how a slide-rule works, has invented the steam engine. Suddenly Ankh-Morpork is at the centre of a transport revolution, as journeys across the Sto Plains that took weeks can now be accomplished in hours. The Patrician assigns the semi-fully-redoubtable Moist von Lipwig, late of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, Bank and Mint, to oversee the expansion of the rail network in a manner that is politically acceptable. But when civil war breaks out amongst the dwarfs of distant Überwald and the Low King has to get home ASAP, Lipwig and Simnel realise their modest invention may have consequences far beyond what they were expecting.

Raising Steam (2013) is the fortieth and, distressingly, penultimate Discworld novel. It's also the third novel to focus on the roguish Moist von Lipwig, following Going Postal and Making Money. Curiously, Pratchett spent several years suggesting that the third Lipwig novel would be called Raising Taxes. The book's appearance in its final form suggests that not even the mighty comedic firepower of Terry Pratchett could make a book on taxation funny, whilst he could certainly stretch to bringing the steam engine to Ankh-Morpork in a comedic manner. This subject matter almost feels like a book that could write itself.

Infamously, this book was written some years after Pratchett's unfavourable medical diagnosis, and in fact is the last novel Pratchett wrote that he fully completed, edited and polished to his satisfaction (the one remaining book, The Shepherd's Crown, was assembled from earlier drafts than Pratchett would normally be happy using). However, as with Snuff, I was surprised not to discern any sign of this in the text. In fact, Raising Steam might be one of Pratchett's best-constructed novels. The average Discworld book was usually put together in stages, stage one being "throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks" and the final stage being, "write some bits between the other bits that hopefully make sense." Most of the time, Pratchett pulled this off well. A few times, he didn't. But it's only a handful of times that he pulls it off as well as this. Raising Steam has a large number of subplots and ideas that are all in motion simultaneously and all pull together at the end with a most satisfying "click."

This may also be the most epic Discworld novel. The book fills a longer timespan than any other in the series, with the action unfolding across a year or more as tens of thousands of people assemble the Discworld's first rail network from a standing start, and Pratchett only makes this rapidity convincing given the enormous manpower the continent can draw upon, including the industrious and newly-emancipated goblin workforce (paying off a major subplot unfolding through Unseen Academicals and Snuff in the process) and a golem taskforce. There are the political ramifications of the development of the railway, requiring Lipwig to engage in political discussions with the leaders of the surrounding towns (and we again get a visit to the very-definitely-not-French city of Quirm, hot on the heels of its semi-starring role in Snuff). There's the ongoing development of the goblin culture. There's the ongoing curious relationship between the Patrician and the Lady Margolotta of Überwald. We revisit the Forest of Skund for the first time since the opening books of the series. We revisit the town of Ohulan Cutash for the first time since Equal Rites (that's Book 3, thirty-seven volumes and twenty-six years earlier, for those not keeping score). We also get the deepest dive, so to speak, into dwarfish culture that we've had in the entire series, with political intrigue, coups and counter-coups. We have the Discworld equivalent of Lenin's mad train ride across Europe in 1917 (if not with quite as bloody as result). We have - get this - battle sequences. We have Vimes playing a major role in a non-Vimes-specific novel. I think we get more City Watch action in this non-City Watch novel than in the last actual City Watch novel. It's a lot.

The book also spans a much a larger amount of the Disc than we've seen for a long time, with discussions of geography, trade routes and national borders. This is the only Discworld novel that comes with a map at the front, which feels like it's breaking the last self-imposed rule Pratchett set upon himself for the series, even if the map feels more inspired by the Reverend W. Awdry's Railway Stories than by Tolkien.

There's also a simmering anger here that is allowed, with appropriate wordplay, to boil over at the right moments. The book is a simmering call to arms in favour of reason, rationality, diplomacy, science and discourse rooted in logic and facts. The world the religious fundamentalist dwarfs want, of superstition and fear and the other kept as far away as is dwarfishly possible, is being swept away and their response is to lash out rather than to adapt. Pratchett has no track with such self-imposed blindness and, as usual when he's annoyed, the author produces some of his best work.

Raising Steam (*****) is a powerhouse freight train of a book, which I was completely not expecting. It depicts the Disc and its vast array of characters in their full panoramic glory, marching into the Industrial Revolution not in fear, but in optimism and hope. If this had been the final Discworld novel, it would have been Pratchett going out on a crowd-pleasing high. But of course that would be a bit too obvious, a bit too easy. For the actual final book, Pratchett would instead go for the emotional jugular.

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Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Commander Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch has faced down some of the greatest perils anyone can think of: dragons, guns, magic, time travel and Ankh-Morpork street food. But now he faces a challenge that he cannot escape, avoid or resist through force: a holiday. Relocating to the Ramkin rural estate, Vimes has to relax, eat good food and perform other hideous tasks like socialising, but his mood improves markedly when the dead bodies start showing up.

Snuff (2011) is the thirty-ninth Discworld novel and the last to feature Commander Sam Vimes in a starring role. The character originated in the eighth Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!, originally published in 1989, and Pratchett carefully developed his character over the course of twenty-two years and multiple books, making him one of the most popular Discworld characters and also the only one to have his own theory of macroeconomics that is often quoted in the real world.

For his swansong, Pratchett gives him a starring role with the rest of the City Watch relegated to brief, background appearances. The plot is nothing spectacularly new, with shades of The Wicker Man and Hot Fuzz here (not to mention a sprinkling of light Jane Austen) as Vimes becomes a fish-out-of-water in the countryside where the rules are different and his normal resources are not available. One of the reasons for Vimes's popularity is his impressive competence, with opponents getting the upper hand through surprise or genuine innovation rather than because the protagonist is given an idiot ball to hold for a while, and that holds true here. Vimes may not know the inns and outs of countryside politics but he does know people and how they operate, and that gives him a strong advantage.

The novel is on the long side for Discworld but is not as egregiously long as Unseen Academicals, which spun its wheels so long it was surprising it could be extracted from the ruts to be published. It helps that Vimes's investigation is genuinely interesting, taking in as it does local economics and the inter-species relationship between humans and goblins, the last Discworld species it is still "okay to hate," something that Vimes sets about changing. We got a taster of this storyline in Unseen Academicals but here it is explored more in-depth, with goblin society explored in full. It's impressive that, almost forty books in, Pratchett was keen to explore more of the Disc and its people.

The book is also helped by its pacing and it furiously action-packed finale, one of Pratchett's stronger resolutions as Vimes and his squad of hand-picked friends have to race along the river to stop a huge injustice taking place. The novel also continues the immensely impressive city-building of Ankh-Morpork, with brief interludes to return to the city to find out what's up with the Patrician and some of the other Watch members.

Given this is a late Pratchett novel, written after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, it is impressive how optimistic it is (an improvement over Academicals). Vimes's investigation legitimises an entire species of people and changes the perception of them overnight, to the betterment of the world. Sergeant Colon, a popular character but one who has been excused for his limited world view and prejudices too long, gets an astonishing wake-up call. Nobby Nobbs finds happiness! Kind of. If that doesn't give you hope for humanity (or immediately adjacent sub-species), I don't know what else will.

On the negative side, we probably again get too many extended scenes with the Patrician, which dents his mystique a little. Pratchett also lets a few running gags (Vimes's son's obsession with excrement of any and all zoological origin; the Patrician's increasingly bitter, metaphorical battle-to-the-death with the Times crossword compiler) maybe run on a few times too long. But these are minor issues.

For late-stage Discworld, Snuff (****½) is a very solid book, packed with interesting ideas that make you think, and some good laughs.

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Microsoft wind up ELDER SCROLLS fans by hinting at the next game's title

Elder Scrolls fans have become a patient breed, with developers Bethesda clocking in almost fifteen years since the release of the last mainline game in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies to become one of the best-selling individual video games of all time, so fans are understandably antsy over when the sequel will be released.

Bethesda did confirm way back in 2018 that The Elder Scrolls VI was in development, allaying fears after the release of multiplayer spin-off prequel, The Elder Scrolls Online. However, with Bethesda all-in on developing Fallout 4 (2015), Fallout 76 (2018) and Starfield (2023), the game had to take a back seat, with full-time development only beginning after Starfield's release three years ago. The game is now Bethesda's main focus, but when to expect it is a key question. Even a six-year development window these days feels quite short, but that would still mean the game not appearing before late 2029, potentially even drifting into the 2030s. Hopefully Bethesda have had a second team working on the game to ensure we get it before then.

Whilst that question will not be answered for some considerable time, another one has been hinted at: what the game will be called. Asha Sharma, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, tweeted that she had seen a playthrough of Elder Scrolls VI and been very impressed (presumably less-impressed at the protest outside Bethesda's Rockville HQ against recent layoffs). Most notably, she called it The Elder Scrolls VI: ********. To emphasise this, Bethesda tweeted back that it was awesome to be able to show her "********." This would seemingly emphasise that the game's title consists of eight letters and one word.

Previous Elder Scrolls games have largely had titles built around locations. The third and fifth games, Morrowind and Skyrim, are named after provinces of the Empire of Tamriel. The first game, Arena, and spin-off game Battlespire are named after individual buildings (though "the Arena" is an archaic name for the whole continent as well). The fourth game, Oblivion, was named after a plane of existence. Spin-off games Redguard and Blades are named after factions within the universe.

With the sixth game widely believed to take place in western Tamriel, in the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, this opens up some intriguing possibilities for the game's title.

• The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel is a noisome title. Sentinel is the name of the capital city of Hammerfell, and likely a key location in the game.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Dominion sounds pretty good. The series metaplot has focused on the rise of the Aldemari Dominion and its challenge to the power of the Empire. This was explored in a key questline in Skyrim. Fans have been theorising that the full-scale confrontation between the Empire and the Dominion, possibly in Hammerfell, is a likely storyline in the sixth game.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Orsinium. Orsinium is a major city-state and kingdom in High Rock, and is the home of Tamriel's civilised orcish civilisation.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Redguard. The Redguards are the primary inhabitants of Hammerfell and are one of the setting's most popular factions. However, no main series game has been named after a faction before. Also, a 1998 action spin-off game was called The Elder Scroll Adventures: Redguard, which might get confusing. That game is very old though and extremely obscure (as well as likely the franchise's least-selling title), and the title is pretty good, so don't put it past Bethesda to reuse it.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Highrock. Maybe the developers have decided to lose the space.

Hopefully this is a hint we might get more information about the game soon, but it's really past time.

Of course, it might be the eight characters were totally random and none of this actually means anything, but fans are so devoid of clues that they'll take anything at this point.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King

Winter has ended, and Lady Whent of Harrenhal has called a great tournament to celebrate. The great and the good from the Seven Kingdoms are attending, most notable amongst them Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, the entire Stark family bar their father, and Lord Robert Baratheon, lately come to his seat after the tragic death of his parents at sea. Robert is due to meet his betrothed, Lyanna Stark, the sister of his best friend Eddard, but her attention is divided between the unjust bullying received by her father's bannerman, the young Howland Reed, from some drunken squires, and strange dreams from her childhood that have been given increased vigour at Harrenhal. But plots and counter-plots swirl as the Mad King himself, Aerys II, puts in an unexpected appearance.

One of the more familiar plaudits offered to A Song of Ice and Fire over its three-decade history has been "Shakespearian." Like the Bard, George R.R. Martin drew on Roman and medieval history to inspire his work, and perhaps Richard III and Julius Caesar as well as the more obvious Hamlet and MacBeth were at least rattling around somewhere in Martin's head when sketching his story of warring knights and scheming politicians. It's therefore appropriate that the long-awaited first stage play based on his Westerosi mythos is being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Bard's own home town on Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Cynics may fear this is merely the latest in the lengthy franchising of the series whilst it remains incomplete, adding to the miniatures, wargames, cookbooks and mugs though, alas, Game of Thrones: The Flamethrower remains conspicuously absent. But whilst the author has battled the howling winter winds, he has grown adroit at finding collaborators and other ways of giving fans new information about the known world of Westeros and Essos. The World of Ice and Fire gave us much-requested information on the history of the world and its wide breadth, whilst Fire & Blood expanded mightily on the Targaryen reign, giving us striking vignettes and short narratives about the reign of the dragons. But nothing George or his collaborators have created previously are as iconic as this: the story of the great tourney at Harrenhal and the civil war it triggered, known (to the winners) as Robert's Rebellion.

This is the immediate inciting event of the history of A Song of Ice and Fire. It's arguably (and literally!) in the smouldering wreckage of this civil war that the story of Ned Stark, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen is born. Martin himself has been wary of portraying this story directly, feeling it takes away too much mystery from the series itself and also feeling that future revelations in the books would tell us all that we needed to know about these events. But script writer Duncan Macmillan disagreed, instead finding in these events a tragic-comic epic, worth retelling in its own right as well as the immediate prequel to the narrative of the books (and, of course, its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones).

The play is split into two distinct halves. The first is focused on the Great Tourney of Harrenhal in the Year of False Spring itself. Prince Rhaegar Targaryen has cunningly decided to use the tourney as cover to gauge the opinions of the great lords of Westeros on whether his father, the Mad King Aerys, should be removed from power. Unfortunately, most of the great lords have refused to come, instead sending their sons to try to win glory on the tourney field. Rhaegar's hopes are further dashed when the Mad King unexpectedly arrives to behold the tourney himself, his first time outside of the Red Keep, let alone King's Landing, for many a year. Rhaegar's political frustrations are undercut when he meets Lyanna Stark, daughter of Lord Rickard of Winterfell. Both have suffered strange visions and dreams since childhood, one of ice and one of fire. By combining the two, they realise they may hold the key to the future...if Rhaegar can convince himself his dreams are real and prophetic, not the prelude to the same madness that has consumed his father. Things are complicated by Lyanna's betrothal to Robert Baratheon, the only great lord who is present and whom Rhaegar seeks to make an ally, and the presence of Rhaegar's wife Elia Martell, who loves to dabble with politics.

The second, much more episodic, half is more familiar, telling of how the Mad King finally snaps the frail bonds of order in Westeros and triggers full-blown civil war, with half of the realm rising against him and too many of the other half decided to sit at home and see which way the wind blows.

As stage productions go, this can only be described as extremely impressive. The audience sits around a stage that cuts through the seating, meaning action can be happening in several places at the same time (though the audio cues and focus means you can't miss the main action). The stage has several immense props that form from underneath and overhead, such as a heart tree that assembles Volton-like whenever characters seek the wisdom of the old gods, whilst the Iron Throne elevates through the rear of the stage (vaguely like a launch sequence from Thunderbirds) whenever the action moves to the Red Keep. Horses are a mixture of human-powered puppets and props. The Mountain is only depicted by a massive suit of armour moved around by stagehands. During several key battles, literally larger-than-life armoured puppet versions of the characters do battle rather than the real actors. The musical accompaniment is excellent. This isn't a musical but there are several in-universe songs that are beautifully performed.

The acting is also almost uniformly excellent. Special props must go to Harmony Rose-Bremner whose Lyanna Stark carries much of the weight of the production (especially in the first half), whose performance is the right mix of funny, melancholic and romantic. Noah Ritter's Rhaegar is also excellent, but it's Callum Woodhouse as Robert Baratheon who maybe emerges as the most surprising performance, here playing Robert not as a fun-loving young buck but a man haunted by an unspeakable family tragedy who seeks oblivion from his feelings in drinking, and fixates on Lyanna as possibly his salvation from grief, going some way to explain his infatuation with her even decades later despite only a short acquaintance. Michael Shaeffer has the hardest task as the Mad King himself, imbuing Aerys with the charisma of the king he used to be but also the cruelty and dangerous whimsy of the tyrant he has become.

The performances and writing here also demonstrate interesting ideas, such as maybe Eddard Stark's (Michael Abubakar) regard for Robert being driven by his similarity to his brother Brandon (Luke Brady), explaining their closeness whilst also being very different. Elizabeth Ayodele is also intriguing as Elia Martell, here an active player in her husband's schemes but who also has a hard head for politics, whilst not perhaps being as skilled at the game as she thinks, especially when she matches wits against the redoubtable Varys (Hughie O'Donnell).

Sometimes the narrative creaks as the playwright struggles to keep all of Martin's numerous references to the tourney across five large novels and several supporting works straight (Tanisha Spring's fun Ashara Dayne being the object of veneration by half the male cast, it seems). The cast is enormous and couldn't get much bigger without becoming unwieldy, but fans may be surprised not to see Jon Connington, Hoster Tully or Jon Arryn at all, with characters like Catelyn, Tywin and Cersei reduced to not much more than cameos.

Fans may also wonder how canon all of this stuff is, and several clear breaks with the books and TV show may suggest that the answer is "eh, kind of." We know from the books that Daenerys and Jon Snow were born multiple months apart, which is not the case here, whilst the play keeps with the book timeline of having Jaehaerys II split the Unlikely King from the Mad King (the Unlikely goes resolutely unnamed here as well, possibly as a nod to spoilers for HBO watchers). Several scenes split by months or weeks in the text are also combined here for dramatic effect, and the timeline as a whole is left somewhat ambiguous, probably a good thing as there are multiple pregnancies to account for.

The play is almost four hours long, which is a formidable length, and it's impressive the cast and crew maintain their energy levels throughout the whole thing. But the splitting of the narrative in two, each with a different character focus, cleverly keeps up the pacing. There's also an air of slightly off-kilter surrealness to the proceedings, making it feel like we're watching a fever dream or maybe even an in-universe play based on garbled historical records many centuries in Westeros's future. If this is ever adapted for the screen, it feels like Denis Villeneuve and his slightly askew vibes would fit it well.

This is a hugely impressive production, engrossing and technically skilled but centered on the excellent performances playing haunted characters trying to do the right thing, but almost invariably making things worse.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King (**** for newcomers but ***** for hardened fans) is running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon in the UK, until 5 September. There are apparently tentative plans for a West End run and possibly overseas, but no firm plans have yet been announced.

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Daredevil: Born Again - Season 2

Wilson Fisk's reign as New York mayor continues, but Daredevil is determined to expose his criminal connections and bring him down, with the help of allies including Karen Page and Jessica Jones. With Daredevil on the run and Fisk protected by mechanisms both legal and illicit, the odds are stacked against the Devil of Hell's Kitchen as never (well, rarely) before.

After Daredevil's original four-season run (including his turn on Defenders) came to an end and Disney+ took over control of Marvel characters on the small screen, fans could assume they'd seen the last of Charlie Cox's take on the character. That decision was reversed twice, first by bringing him into the mainstream MCU through cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk, and then by reversing a decision to reboot the character at the eleventh hour and retroactively canonising the entire Netflix-Marvel run of shows (including the characters of Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage).

Although welcome, this decision was only made after production on Daredevil: Born Again had started, so the first season was a little hamstrung in having to incorporate the material shot for the original, reboot version of the story with the new material acknowledging the prior canon. Season 2, happily, is free of such restrictions and the show can try to achieve the potential of what it wanted to be.

There are basically two main storylines here. The first is a political story as Wilson Fisk - Kingpin - tightens his control over New York's political life as well as its criminal underbelly, a balancing act he is initially very successful at but soon threatens to unravel, as his impatience cannot deal with the slow-moving wheels of bureaucracy. His own allies and workers start developing doubts about his brutal methods, but are too scared or feel too powerless to act. Daredevil is keen to take down Fisk, but is losing the battle of public opinion and the relentless surveillance state makes it hard for him to move around the city and do his normal thing. The actual US government smells a rat with Fisk, but is constitutionally bared from intervening...unless Fisk can be exposed.

The tension of the show is driven by these competing plotlines. Daredevil can't just track down Fisk and beat him up, and Fisk can't just unleash the full force of his brutal methods whilst his every move is being tracked in the full glare of media and political scrutiny. Both characters are constrained, and have to work within those constraints, which is much more interesting.

The show is also strengthened by the expansion of the cast. After only fleeting appearances in Season 1, Deborah Ann Woll returns in a key role as Karen Page. Woll is an extremely strong (and underrated) performer, and imbues Karen with a lot of charisma and dangerously impetuous energy without ever making you lose sympathy for her. It's a remarkable balancing act and having her back is great. Jessica Jones also gets a key role in several episodes, and Krysten Ritter brings her world-weary cynicism as usual, but here tempered with more empathy, hinting at off-screen character development. 

Not all the cast are firing on top guns. Matthew Lillard is possibly the least convincing CIA agent in screen history, and there's maybe one or two many identikit political movers or criminal gang lords wandering around the story. A bit of sprawl can be a good thing, and this season at least feels like events are happening on a big scale, but not so much when you start forgetting which minor criminal gang leader is supporting Fisk, which is opposing him, and which is apparently supporting him but also willing to backstab him.

There's a lot going on here, for a nice change, as it fills up the eight-hour runtime quite well, with a lot of subplots to go around. Cox is possibly at his very best as a Daredevil constrained by the system he swore to uphold and with his pool of allies rapidly thinning out, whilst Vincent D'Onofrio gives an outstanding performance as Fisk has everything he ever wanted - power, respect, influence, a beautiful and intelligent wife - but finds it still cannot fill the hole in his soul. There's always been a tragic, operatic element to Fisk's story and character, especially this version of him, and D'Onofrio plays that to the hilt.

An excellent season of television which, at times, threatens to be the best thing Marvel has put on the small screen, unravels towards the very end with unexpected rapidity. The trial of a main character turns into a trial of Wilson Fisk, his motives and his measures, and it's extremely tense and well-written. But the show goes too far when the tension breaks and we end up with a situation which gets very implausible (bordering on the idiotic) very quickly. The season's cliffhanger ending is so contrived that it will have your eyebrows halfway to Mars before the end credits are done. I know Marvel are aware they have a good villain deficit (especially since Thanos bought it, twice) and D'Onofrio is one of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal, but they are also at risk here of over-using him and eliminating his menace and power.

This is frustrating and disappointing, as up until the last half-hour or so, Daredevil: Born Again's second season (****) and the sixth season overall to feature Cox as Daredevil in a leading role, is outstanding. As it stands, the in-production third season is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the ending of this season seem less disappointing. The show is currently streaming worldwide on Disney+.

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Wonder Man: Season 1

Legislation has barred people with special powers from working in Hollywood, a rule enforced by the Department of Damage Control. When they suspect that up-and-coming actor Simon Williams has secret powers, they recruit ex-Mandarin actor Trevor Slattery to befriend him and learn the truth. Slattery is at first keen to help in return for money and his freedom, but as he gets to know Williams and sees things in him that remind him of his own career at a younger age, Slattery starts to have second thoughts.

It's probably fair to say that the Marvel TV explosion of the early 2020s did not pan out as hoped. Whilst we did get several good shows - WandaVision and Loki were the highlights - and several okay ones (like Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk), we also got Secret Invasion, easily the weakest project the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe has delivered to date. Marvel made the decision to pivot back to the big screen, leaving the fate of Wonder Man, filmed back in 2023, unclear. Eventually Disney put it out in early 2026 with relatively little fanfare.

Almost predictably, the show ends up being superb. The series is focused on the relationship between Simon Williams, played with gravity, presence and humour by the talented  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Slattery, played with sly irreverence and occasional tragic pathos by Ben Kingsley. Producer-showrunner-director Destin Daniel Cretton, who made this shortly before starting work on Spider-Man: Brand New Day, was inspired to make the movie after shooting Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and realising that Marvel had an untapped powerhouse in its hands with Ben Kingsley, one of our greatest living actors.

The eight-part series opens almost as a standard drama, with Williams trying to make it as an actor. He's gotten as far as having mid-ranking recurring roles on TV dramas, but his obsession with making each character have integrity is grating on time-minded directors. Williams's family is also divided on his ambition, his mother being supported but his brother, a successful businessman, is frustrated at his lack of ambition and progress. This is all quite compelling thanks to some good writing and outstanding performances. The arrival of Slattery and the references to his past as the Mandarin (from Iron Man 3) ties events into the wider MCU, but it's done with a relatively light touch. A Damage Control agent recurs from Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ms. Marvel, but there are almost no references to his previous escapades, so newcomers need not be put off.

Because the show works so well as a serious drama with bursts of comic fun (including a great interlude with Joe Pantoliano playing an unhinged version of himself), the fear is that its further integration into the MCU and exploration of Williams's powers will dilute the premise. But the show does a good job of using those elements to explore Williams' character, as well as giving Kingsley more meat to chew on. Kingsley's charcter has mostly been used so far in the MCU for comic relief, but Wonder Man gives him much more range and, obviously, the actor rises to the occasion. The eight episodes are perhaps a little too much for the story on offer here, but this is offset by the fourth episode Doorman, an effectively self-contained mini-movie explaining why Hollywood has barred superhero actors. More wildly inventive in its hour-long runtime than most of the last dozen Marvel movies, the episode is a terrific, fun time as well as providing much-need exposition.

But ultimately the show is about the relationship and friendship that builds between Williams and Slattery (somewhere between mentor-student, father-son and bromance), and how that factors into their life choices. The show builds up an impressive emotional weight missing from too many recent MCU projects. In short, it makes you care about the characters, an important rule of scripting that too many modern projects have forgotten.

The show does falter a little. Even with the excellent flashback diversion, the story isn't enough to completely fill the runtime, and the low-key, low-stakes nature of the story may not appeal to everyone. But others will enjoy what is possibly the best look we've had so far at what living in the MCU is like for ordinary people, and for people with powers but who aren't the Hulk or Spider-Man.

Thoughtful and witty in turn, Wonder Man (****½) is one of the best slices of the MCU on the small screen with outstanding performances by its two leads. It is available to watch worldwide now on Disney+.

The show was renewed for a second season a few months ago, but this decision was abruptly reversed a few weeks ago. However, given that Cretton has just delivered Marvel the highest-grossing opening movie of all time, maybe he can convince them to change their minds again.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.