TV Review – Star Trek Discovery: Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad

TL;DR – What is the future of the Federation going to be? As the war drags on we get a glimpse of two possible directions.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

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Review

Today we get Star Trek Discovery’s first bottle episode, and what is a bottle episode you may say? Well, this is a term in TV for an episode that uses minimal effects, guest stars, and filmed only on existing sets. You may have seen many of these before, where say something forces people to stay in one location, or if you are really unlucky you get a clip show like The Next Generations episode Shades of Gray. Bottle episodes are usually created to be cheaper episodes to produce and tend to be looked down on, however, good bottle episodes use the limitations to tell profound stories like the Deep Space Nine episode Duet. So like all good bottle episodes, we spend a lot of Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad getting to know our characters better, and it is a delight to watch. Now as we will be looking at the full episode there may be some [SPOILERS] ahead, so be a bit careful if you have not seen the episode.

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Movie Review – Happy Death Day

TL;DR – A surprising solid film, even if it is just Groundhog Day with murder

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Happy Death Day. Image Credit: Blumhouse/Universal.

Review

What if at the end of the night you were murdered, but the next day you woke up at the start of the day again, destined to live your life out, day after day after day, each night murdered by the same masked killer. Now, of course, you might be going, ‘isn’t that just Groundhog Day with murder’ and you would be correct, Happy Death Day joins a long list of films/TV Shows using the same narrative device. Now is it as good as Groundhog Day, no, it’s not even the best redo of this narrative device, that would go to the Stargate SG1 episode Window of Opportunity. However, it is still a good film, mostly because you can see some real effort has gone into the production, that plus the entertaining cast and some unexpected emotional themes make Happy Death Day a really good film.

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