WHEEL OF TIME TV series in development (but not yet greenlit) at Amazon

The very strange case of Amazon developing the Wheel of Time TV series with Sony but not really wanting to talk about it continues.

It's an open secret in the business that Amazon is the company that Sony have teamed up with Amazon to bring an adaptation of Robert Jordan's 14-volume fantasy series to the screen. Rafe Judkins (Agents of SHIELD) is working on the project as a screenwriter and possible showrunner, and the pilot script was completed some time ago. Judkins was recently in Guatemala on a writer's retreat to work on the series, possibly with other writers to hand. Although Amazon was known to have had talks with Sony as early as the start of 2017, the announcement of a big-budget Lord of the Rings TV series in November led some to believe that Amazon would not want to develop a superficially similar project at the same time.

Clearly that's not an issue, because all indications since then are that Amazon are on board. Deadline confirmed the company's involvement in February, along with a Dark Tower TV series. After some confusion, Amazon confirmed that Dark Tower is "in development" at Amazon but has not yet received a green light. The project was originally a spin-off from the 2017 Dark Tower movie, but that movie bombing may have led to a creative rethink.

The status of Wheel of Time is a bit more mysterious. We know it is in development at Amazon, but Amazon have so proven unwilling to even give a brief "it's in development" comment as with Dark Tower. Even Amazon customer service representatives seem to be confused as to the official status of the project, some confirming it is in development and others being tighter-lipped.

At JordanCon last month, Harriet McDougall - Robert Jordan's widow and literary executor - confirmed that the Wheel of Time series has a network and it's not a "normal" one, basically meaning it will be a streaming service. This eliminates the last few cable channels from contention (Starz and AMC were believed to have looked the project over, likely passing due to costs) and leaves Amazon, Netflix, CBS All Access, Apple TV and the new Disney streaming service as the primary contenders. Amazon obviously has to be the front-runner, due to both all of the previous information and Jeff Bezos's drive to hoover up all of the major SFF franchises not already snapped up by Netflix or elsewhere. She also confirmed that it won't be a pilot order, but a straight to series commitment which is also standard for streaming.

The reasons for the ongoing obfuscation are likely linked to the different partners involved: Amazon, Sony and Radar Pictures all have part of the production pie, whilst the Bandersnatch Group (the official name of the Robert Jordan Estate) and Red Eagle Productions have producer and advisory roles. As a result no formal announcement can be made until all five of these parties (and likely others) are satisfied with the pilot script and the progress of the project. This may happen imminently or it may still be a few months away. Amazon have also announced a lot of projects recently and likely want to open up some room before making further big announcements.

As usual, I'll cover news here and Wheel of Time TV is continuing to cover all of the latest rumours.

Franchise Familiariser: BattleTech

This is the year of BattleTech. A brand-new strategy video game just came out (and is excellent), another video game is due at the end of the year and both the miniatures wargame and the roleplaying game are getting refreshed this year. There’s more interest in the franchise than there has been in maybe a decade, but what to do if you’re intrigued but have no idea what it’s all about? Time for a Franchise Familiariser course!

The second edition of BattleTech and the first to use that name, released in 1985.

The Basics

BattleTech (and its related brand, MechWarrior) – not be confused with Robotech – is a franchise that merges elements of space opera, military science fiction, fantasy and Japanese manga and anime. It was originally created as a tabletop wargame, followed by a pen-and-paper RPG, but gained its greatest exposure through video games, a lengthy series of novels and a short-run animated series which ran for half a season in 1994.

BattleTech was created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babock III for FASA Corporation in 1984 as a tabletop wargame. The original idea had been to create a wargame using large, human-piloted robots known as BattleMechs or ‘mechs. Originally called BattleDroids, the game had to change its name after a few months due to a copyright claim by Lucasfilm (who claimed that they had copyrighted “droids” as part of their Star Wars franchise). A companion tabletop roleplaying game, MechWarrior, was published in 1986. The first BattleTech video games, The Crescent Hawk’s Inception and The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge, were released in 1988 and 1990 respectively.

The franchise received a significant boost in popularity, however, through the MechWarrior video game series. The original MechWarrior (1989) was well-received but it was MechWarrior 2 (1995) that took the series to new heights. Released at exactly the right moment to capitalise on 3D graphics cards and more powerful PCs, the game was a huge success. It was followed by MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (1996), MechWarrior 3 (1999), MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (2000) and MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries (2002).

In 2001 FASA almost went bust and sold the BattleTech and MechWarrior properties to WizKids. In 2003 WizKids was bought by Topps but continued to release new material under the WizKids name. They have also provided companies such as FanPro and Catalyst Games with licences. Since 2007, Catalyst Game Labs has been releasing new versions of the classic wargame and the roleplaying game, whilst Piranha Studios and Harebrained Schemes have released new video games.

2018-19 has been dubbed the “year of BattleTech”, with two new video games (BattleTech from Harebrained and MechWarrior 5 from Piranha) and a refreshed version of the wargame and roleplaying game on the way from Catalyst.

MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP

BBC to release RED DWARF and DOCTOR WHO in HD

In an interesting move, the BBC has confirmed they are releasing Doctor Who and Red Dwarf on Blu-Ray in high definition...despite the original shows being shot natively on video, which should make such a process impossible.

Backing up and as previously discussed at length in our HD remastering discussions for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Wire, The X-Files and the proposed (and unlikely-to-happen) Babylon 5 remastering, it has been possible for various TV shows to be natively remastered in HD or even 4K because they were shot on film. Film retains a huge amount of information (as it's also what was used for movies, projected onto massive cinema screens) so getting a very high quality image from the original film source is a relatively straightforward process.

The complicating factor in most American TV shows is that, although shot on film, they were mastered (that is, having music, sound effects and visual effects added) on much lower-quality videotape, which is where the broadcast version of the episode exists. Videotape is impossible to remaster, because the extra visual information simply doesn't exist in the image. If you tried, the image would just come up very blurry with large and visible pixels. So, for shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, the remastering team had to go back and re-edit every single episode together from scratch, re-add the music and sound effects and redo all of the visual effects from scratch in HD. This was both time-consuming and very expensive.

In case of British television shows which were shot on video - i.e. they never existed on film at all - it was assumed that they would simply never be remastered and would have to remain in standard definition forever. There has been some talk of advanced extrapolation - scanning the original material, blowing it up to HD and then filling in the pixels dynamically with an advanced algorithm - but this appears to be many years away still.

These new Blu-Ray editions appear instead to be "upscales", an attempt to make the episodes appear to be HD through a more primitive process of adding more pixels to the screen. It can be a very variable process, sometimes surprisingly effective and other times disastrous. I'd wait for reviews before seeing how well the upscale has been done.

In the case of Doctor Who, it appears that so far only a "test run" is being done with Season 12, the first season to star Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. Originally broadcast from 1974 to 1975, this season was chosen as it features the most popular Doctor and features arguably two of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time, The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks. The Blu-Ray will also have lots of new special features, including a brand-new retrospective by Tom Baker on his time as the Doctor. It will be released on 11 June 2018.

Red Dwarf's release is much more confident, with Seasons 1-8 being released in a single box set in one go. This will be released on 1 October 2018.

Paramount greenlight STAR TREK 4, put STAR TREK 5 into development

Paramount has doubled down on its commitment to the Star Trek universe. It has greenlit Star Trek 4, with S.J. Clarkson on board to direct the film. Star Trek 5, meanwhile, is being developed by a team of writers working with Quentin Tarantino.

Star Trek Beyond was released in 2016 to reasonable reviews but underperformed at the box office, leading to speculation that Paramount might rest the film franchise. Quentin Tarantino voiced his interest in potentially helming a Star Trek film last year, citing his great love of the original series and The Next Generation and saying he'd draw inspiration from classic episodes such as The City of the Edge of Forever and Yesterday's Enterprise.

Instead, it seems that Paramount has decided to press ahead with the original Star Trek 4 plan, given that Tarantino will be busy for the next year and a half or so with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Star Trek 4, based on an idea by J.J. Abrams, is a time travel adventure where Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) meet Kirk's father, played by Chris Hemsworth in the 2009 movie. Quinto has apparently already signed on and Pine and Hemsworth are in negotiations. Presumably the rest of the Star Trek reboot crew will also appear, apart from Anton Yelchin (Chekov) who sadly passed away after completing filming on Star Trek Beyond.

S.J. Clarkson cut her teeth in UK television, helming six episodes of the acclaimed 2006-07 drama Life on Mars as well as episodes of Hustle. She subsequently moved to the US and has directed episodes of Heroes, Dexter, Jessica Jones and The Defenders. Clarkson is the first woman to direct a Star Trek movie and only the eighth woman to direct Star Trek at all (following on from Gabrielle Beaumont, Gates McFadden, Nancy Malone, Roxanne Dawson, Kim Friedman, Allison Liddi and Hanelle Culpepper) in its 52-year history.

Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek movie, currently listed as Star Trek 5, is in development. It's unclear if Tarantino's movie will use the reboot cast, will be set in a new version of The Next Generation or will be some other kind of project, but according to the Hollywood Reporter the movie will be set "in a different timeline" to the rest of the franchise.

In related news, filming of the second season of Star Trek: Discovery is underway, with CBS confirming that the season - which will be partially set on the original, Constituion-class USS Enterprise - will introduce uniforms inspired by the original series' classic, colour-coded uniforms. The season is expected to debut on CBS All Access in early 2019.

The Avengers: Infinity War

The Titan Thanos has begun his plan to unite the Infinity Stones and wipe out half of the life the universe. His plan involves seizing the Stones from remote planets, the Collector of Knowhere and from Xandar, and the several Stones that have come to rest on Earth. In deep space the Guardians of the Galaxy join forces with Thor to defeat Thanos, whilst on Earth the fractured Avengers have to overcome their differences and unite again to fight his armies.

It's entirely possible that no movie in history has had a build-up like Infinity War. Almost every one of the eighteen preceding movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been laying pipe and groundwork for this film, from introducing the Infinity Stones one-by-one to brief appearances by Thanos to the introduction of both the extravagant space opera and mystical sides of the universe through Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange. Marvel and Disney have shown tremendous restraint and forbearance in not pulling the triggers on those stories too early and making sure they have their ducks lined up in just the right row before finally committing.

Infinity War is an insanely massive movie. Starting as it means to go on - with a massacre which leaves several established characters dead and one MIA (which weirdly goes unmentioned for the whole movie) - the film barely lets up. Characters big and small going right back to the start of the MCU ten years ago (including some you thought you'd never see again) show up, some with large roles to play, some for an extended cameo. Despite the weight of the massive cast, directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely somehow create a very coherent film with four distinct acts and the kind of tension filled, multi-pronged final battle on two separate fronts that we haven't seen since Return of the Jedi.

It also helps that although the movie is filled to the brim with heroes and big personalities, the film keeps its focus firmly on a central quintet. Thanos himself dominates proceedings, Josh Brolin (somehow) investing this big purple dude with some real pathos in scenes where we learn more about his backstory, his family and his homeworld. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) also has a major role to play, her family issues with both Thanos and Nebula proving a key emotional motivation for the film. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) also has a lot of screentime, clearly having feeling annoyed after the events of Thor: Ragnarok and determined to kick someone's backside. Scenes pairing him and Bradley Cooper's Rocket Raccoon (or "Rabbit" as Thor insists) are excellent, and then get better when they join forces with a giant space dwarf played by Peter Dinklage. Dinklage's screentime is limited but extraordinarily effective (he also gets arguably the best line of the movie, but it's a really tough choice). Rounding off the central focus is Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), two extremely different people who prove to be an effective team.

Lots of other characters get their moments in the sun (although Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner seems to be reduced to a harbinger of doom whilst he's dealing with, er, "performance" problems as Hulk), although the role of Captain America (Chris Evans) in the movie is surprisingly small. The directors know how to deliver a great superhero arrival scene just as all hope seems lost and also how to frame an action sequence. There's a lot of explosions, CG people being flung around and strange creatures and it all flows mostly well, with only a couple of moments where CG fatigue threatens to set in. Infinity War is not a movie any sane person can call restrained, but it's a movie that knows when and where to deploy its monstrous resources (adjusted for inflation, Infinity War is the most expensive movie ever made) to maximum effect.

It's also a surprisingly emotional movie. The weakness of films - and the reason we've seen television explode in comparison recently - is that it's very hard to introduce characters, establish motivation, emotionally invest the audience and then deliver a payoff in under two hours. Infinity War is instead able to draw on almost forty hours of previous character development in the MCU, so even when a fairly minor character bites the dust it hurts a little. When more major characters bite it, things get real (and at least some of these characters aren't coming back).

When the movie runs aground is in its ending, which is impossible to talk about without major spoilers. Suffice to say that the Chekhov's Gun maxim is employed by full force in the film and when you walk out of the cinema - especially if you know the significance of the post-credit sequence and what movie will immediately precede Infinity War II next year - you'll probably be able to immediately pen a fairly close outline of what happens. I mean, if they completely wrong-foot us, fair enough, but some of the choices made in the ending are completely nonsensical if you have any knowledge of what's coming and what's not coming down the Marvel production pipe later on.

Another major weakness is that the film undersells its new team of villains, the Black Order (servants of Thanos). Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Ebony Maw and Carrie Coon as Proxima Midnight are particularly excellent, but both get limited screen time (especially Carrie Coon, one of the best actresses on TV, who is almost unrecognisable).

Finally, Marvel has gone to some lengths to say that Infinity War is a stand-alone movie and it's as-yet untitled sequel next year (which has already been shot) is a movie in its own right and not just the second half of one bigger story. That's quite frankly untrue, and a lot of the more dramatic and emotional moments from Infinity War will live or die depending on what happens in the sequel.

If you can step out of the meta-knowledge, The Avengers: Infinity War (****) is a very effective action movie with lots of solid action scenes, some real dramatic moments of power and a refreshingly ruthless attitude to its cast of massive stars. It lacks the pacing, focus and character interplay of, say, Guardians of the Galaxy or Black Panther (or even the first Avengers), but's in the upper tier of Marvel Cinematic Universe films and in balancing an unprecedentedly vast cast with solid storytelling, it's almost achieves the impossible.

The film is on general release worldwide from today.

New STAR WARS TV series RESISTANCE announced

Disney and Lucasfilm have confirmed that the next Star Wars animated series, the follow-up to Clone Wars and Rebels, will be called Star Wars: Resistance.

The new show will take place a few years prior to The Force Awakens and sees the discovery of the threat posed by the First Order, with the Resistance being founded to stand against them. The series will focus on the character of Kazuda Xiono, an ace pilot recruited by General Leia Organa and trained by Poe Dameron, along with several other pilots. It sounds like the show's recurring villain will be an earlier-in-her-career Captain Phasma, whilst BB-8 will also show up.

Resistance will be produced by Dave Filoni and many of the same crew who created both Clone Wars and Rebels. However, the new show will employ a different art style, which will mix the 3D animation of the older shows with a cel-shaded anime influence. It sounds like production has been underway on the new show for some months, with it already slated to debut on the Disney Channel this autumn.

Cast-wise, the most exciting news is that both Oscar Isaac and Gwendoline Christie will be reprising their roles from the new Star Wars movies.

This project is in addition to the new live-action Star Wars TV series being produced for Jon Favreau and expected to debut in late 2019.

Cover art for George R.R. Martin's FIRE AND BLOOD revealed

Bantam and HarperCollins Voyager have revealed their cover art for the US and UK editions of George R.R. Martin's Fire and Blood (although the UK cover is apparently not finalised yet and there may be some changes prior to publication).

The American cover art for Fire and Blood

Fire and Blood is the first part of a lengthy history of the Targaryen rule of Westeros, covering the period from the Doom up to the regency of King Aegon III, the Dragonbane. The book covers the Targaryen Conquest, the misrule of Maegor the Cruel, the Faith Militant Uprising, the long rule of Jaehaerys the Conciliator and the chaos and blood of the civil war known as the Dance of Dragons.

The book was originally written across three or four months back in 2012 as part of The World of Ice and Fire, but Martin ended up producing way too much material for that book, leaving his co-authors Linda Antonsson and Elio Garcia, Jr. to summarise this material. This is the full, unexpurgated text and incorporates the sections previously published separately as The Sons of the Dragon, The Rogue Prince and The Princess and the Queen.

Martin's plan originally had been to hold back the entire history (including the as-yet-unwritten second half, covering Aegon III's reign through Blackfyre Rebellion, the War of the Ninepenny Kings and the Mad King's downfall in the War of the Usurper, aka Robert's Rebellion) until after A Song of Ice and Fire was completed. However, the material he'd already completed for the first half runs almost as long as A Game of Thrones itself, 989 manuscript pages and roughly 270,000-odd words (compared to AGoT's 1,088 manuscript pages and 298,000 words), so the work would have been published in two volumes anyway. Martin has no plans to write the second book as yet since it would by definition include major spoilers for the Dunk & Egg stories and also for A Song of Ice and Fire itself.

The (working) UK cover art for Fire and Blood.

Martin also confirms that work remains ongoing on The Winds of Winter, but seemingly confirmed in the same blog post that the book will not be published in 2018.

Fire and Blood will be published on 20 November this year and will feature 75 black-and-white illustrations by Doug Wheately.

SENSE8 finale gets airdate

The series finale of Sense8 has been given an airdate. The movie-length grand finale to the story will air on Netflix on 8 June.

Netflix cancelled Sense8 last year after, curiously, airing the second season with almost no marketing, meaning that even big fans of the show were unaware it had returned. Netflix had chosen instead to keep marketing 13 Reasons Why, despite that show already being a big hit, and the need to get eyes on Sense8 being much greater because of its larger budget (Sense8's second season cost an eyewatering $9 million per episode). This was a bit of an own goal, to put it mildly, and after a fan campaign which involved mass rewatches of the first two seasons, Netflix agreed to fund a two-hour finale. This will wrap up the second season's cliffhanger ending and will provide a conclusion to the series overall, despite writers J. Michael Straczynski and the Wachowskis previously saying that the show was meant to run for an additional three seasons.

Some fans are hoping that the finale is successful enough to warrant a third season being commissioned, although that seems unlikely.

Gratuitous Lists: Seven Great Albums

There's a thing going round asking people to list their seven favourite/most important albums of all time (to them). So here's mine:

R.E.M.
Automatic for the People
1992

Tracklisting: Drive • Try Not to Breathe • The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite • Everybody Hurts • New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 • Sweetness Follows • Monty Got a Raw Deal • Ignoreland • Star Me Kitten • Man on the Moon • Nightswimming • Find the River

Although they'd been knocking around since 1981, ceaselessly touring and releasing multiple critically-acclaimed albums, it was REM's seventh LP, Out of Time, that finally catapulted them to superstardom. Fronted by the monster hits "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People", the record propelled the band to ubiquitous status, to both the band's pleasure but discomfort. Although grateful for the financial security afforded by their success, the band were wary of becoming "radio-friendly unit-shifters" and low-key rebelled. They refused to tour Out of Time and went straight back into the studio to rush-record a follow up.

Drummer Bill Berry insisted that the record had to rock hard and the rest of the band initially agreed, but both music and lyrics instead went very stripped-back, bare and acoustic. After the expansive Out of Time, Automatic for the People (named after the motto of a local restaurant, Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods: "It's automatic, people!") was introverted, moody and - mostly - quiet. The band were confident that they'd made an album that would not repeat the monster success of its forebear, especially in a music industry now dominated by grunge (Michael Stipe gladly handing over the "spokesman of a generation" mantle to his friend Kurt Cobain).

Instead, the record utterly eclipsed it (to the tune of just under 20 million copies sold by itself). "Everybody Hurts" became the melancholic anthem of the year and the album generated a further five singles, although frankly every song on the album could be a single bar the instrumental. It's kind of cool now to disdain Automatic a little and instead opt for Murmur, Document or New Adventures in Hi-Fi as REM's top album, but that ignores the album's irrepressible atmosphere which mixes hope and melancholy, love and hate, and politics and emotion.

MORE AFTER THE BREAK

Cowboy Bebop

2071. A hyperspace gateway accident has made Earth almost uninhabitable, scattering humanity across the Solar system, with huge centres of population to be found on Mars and Ganymede, whilst Venus is being terraformed. Ex-crime syndicate member Spike Spiegel and ex-cop Jet Black are "cowboys", bounty-hunters working from the Bebop, a spacecraft with aquatic capabilities. They're happy working alone, but soon find themselves reluctantly acquiring new recruits: a strangely intelligent dog called Ein, an amnesiac con artist named Faye Valentine and a brilliant young hacker, Ed. Together they get into strange adventures from one end of the Solar system to the other as they try to get a big score...and forget their pasts.

Cowboy Bebop originally aired in Japan in 1998 and received significant critical acclaim, which has only increased in the last two decades. It's an anime (animated Japanese series) that draws on large numbers of influences, including significant western ones such as film noir, Westerns and jazz. Its acclaim and place in the anime pantheon is down to its accessibility, the relatively straightforward storylines and the very fine characterisation.

At first glance Cowboy Bebop adheres to the "small dysfunctional group of people on a small ship" paradigm previously seen in TV shows like Blake's 7 and Red Dwarf and films like Star Wars, and later employed by the likes of Firefly, The Expanse and Farscape, not to mention novel series like Chris Wooding's Tales of the Ketty Jay. Generally, each episode revolves around Jet and Spike picking up a bounty contract and trying to take the target down, usually through escalating and increasingly riotous complications. Several key episodes eschew this format in favour of exploring our heroes' backstories, with tinted flashbacks revealing how they got from where they were to hiding on a starship at the arse end of space. Cowboy Bebop has been called a coda or epilogue to a story that we never got to see, which is an interesting approach to a narrative but also one that works really well.

The show is rooted in its four characters: Spike is disinterested and apathetic until he is either annoyed or he is drawn back into his criminal past. Jet is more empathetic but, as the Bebop's owner, is often distracted by their always-precarious financial situation. Faye pretends to be too cool to be concerned about anyone else, but as the series continues we learn more about her insecurities and her missing memories. Ed is...thirteen and strange, and "data dog" Ein steals most of the scenes he's in. These initial characterisations are deepened as we explore more about their past episode by episode.

The show is unusual for eschewing anime's love of deep serialisation and increasingly convoluted long-running story arcs and focusing more on adventures of the week, with the occasional "arc episode" with longer-term ramifications. This allows for a lot of tonal variation. Some episodes are very bloody and action-focused, others are very comedic, others are romances or noir mysteries. At least two episodes are outright horror (Alien gets a homage), and the series as a whole can be seen as something of a tragedy, with the ambiguous finale approaching with gruelling inevitability. But there's also lots of good humour, some non sequitur moments (one episode seems to be one of the writers getting his obsession with the VHS/Betamax wars off his chest) and a commitment to character that is highly successful.

The animation is, mostly, excellent. There's some outstanding compositions and imagery throughout the show and the production design of the spaceships and future cities is top notch. More variable is the CGI, which was in its infancy at the time. There's not much of it, but it varies from the outstanding (the CG Mars the Bebop flies over several times is fantastic) to the patchy and risible (a background shot of Jupiter looks like a late-1990s screensaver).

One of Cowboy Bebop's greatest strengths is its music. The title theme and the outro song are both very good, but every episode is packed with songs from multiple genres including blues, jazz, rock, country, heavy metal and, in one Shaft-riffing episode, some R&B. Legendary composer Yoko Kanno is responsible for the show's soundtrack which must have a serious claim on being the best soundtrack for a single season of TV, animated or otherwise, ever made.

On the negative side of things, some episodes are a bit lacking in exposition, but usually if you wait long enough all of the major plot points are explained and the character arcs make sense. More of an issue - for some viewers - will be that the characters are mostly dressed sensibly for the dangers they are facing, but Faye is near-constantly portrayed in revealing outfits. It's odd because the show not only lampshades this a couple of times (showing they're aware of it), but even goes out of its way to present less-prominent female characters in a less exploitative manner. One episode, about a female space trucker with a love of heavy metal music, is particularly welcome for its exploration of a "non-standard" (at least from the perspective of the time it was made) female character. Faye is certainly a very strongly-characterised figure with an interesting backstory, but you have to put up with some silly outfits to get to that part of the story.

Nevertheless, Cowboy Bebop (****½) is a very strong show. It's tight and constrained (consisting of only 24 episodes) with some of the best and most memorable characters you'll ever seen in a TV show. The worldbuilding is excellent (excepting the fact it's unlikely we'll have colonised the entire Solar system in just seventy years), the stories are well-written and the thematic explorations of love, loss, redemption and family are highly successful. It also makes a great gateway show for those unfamiliar with anime's tropes and ideas. It is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and is available to watch on Netflix in the UK as well.