Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral (1994)

NIN: The Downward Spiral (1994)

For me, The Downward Spiral is one of the greatest albums of the 90s. It's noisy but it's beautiful. It's textured, multifaceted and multilayered, so you may be hearing things on your fiftieth listen that you hadn't heard before.

It's a concept album in which each song is like a piece of jigsaw puzzle; some of the pieces are more revealing of the whole than others, but when the picture is complete it becomes a darkened mirror that both entices and frightens. It has insect noises. It has film samples. It's the perfect example of creativity born from negativity given form. The production sounds like it was recorded yesterday.

Knights of God (1987)

Knights of God (1987)

13 episodes, approx 26 minutes each.

Dirs. Andrew Morgan (7 eps) and Michael Kerrigan (6 eps)

The fists and crossed swords symbol used by the Knights is a simple but striking and highly evocative design, wordlessly communicating to a viewer that the guiding credo of the order isn't benevolent preservation or protection, it's one of militaristic strength and aggression nestled within the colours that are historically associated with fascism.

In post-civil war Britain (the year 2020 AD) the self-proclaimed Knights rule with force, guns and border patrols, killing any who dare resist their control. It's a children's TV show but the killing doesn't happen off-screen. There's more hard-hitting acts of violence shown than you'd expect to see in a production with such a classification.

In today's culturally sensitive climate it would probably be either heavily cut or labelled as YA.

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (2009)

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (2009)

Author: Neil Gaiman | Illustrator: P. Craig Russell | Page Count: 144

"In the flickering light ... the monk experienced a strange illusion – it occurred to him that a scrap of his shadow was missing, gone as if it had been torn away."

For the 20th anniversary of Sandman, Gaiman permitted an adaptation of his 1999 novella of the same name into a comic format. I didn't buy it at the time because it seemed unnecessary; the original was perfect, so why bother making it into something it wasn't meant to be? It smelt like an easy cash grab.

I relented (after three years!) and bought it because it was on sale. It turns out it's equally as good — and in places even better — than the novella and actually feels like it could be a part of the original comic book series.

It could easily be included in one of the stand-alone collections and it wouldn't feel out of place.

RoboCop: The TV Series (1994)

RoboCop: The TV Series (1994)

Feature-length pilot and 21 episodes, approx 44 minutes each.

Wisely ignoring the existence of RoboCop 2 and 3 (like many people tend to do), the cheapo TV series is set two years after the events of the first film.

It feels like something I'd have sat down to watch on a Saturday evening as a kid after The A-Team had ended and before the crap variety show with Jimmy bloody Tarbuck came on. If you stumble upon the series while channel-hopping you may give it little more than five minutes before hopping some place else. That's because it takes a couple of episodes before the show begins to justify its existence.

There's a lot of attempted humour; not quite slapstick and certainly not sophisticated, it sits somewhere between the two and ends up mostly face-palm bad.

The aspect that stayed me from pressing the stop button is the relationships. When it finds the human element that's buried within the machine parts it becomes mildly entertaining and raises itself out of the shit-bin for a time. It's still bad, but it has measurable heart beneath the clumsy scripts and the awful villains.

Star Trek: The Return (1996)

Star Trek: The Return (1996)

Authors: William Shatner / Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens  | Page Count: 371

'For a silent moment after, even the rain stopped. When it began again, it felt gentle. Warm. Slow as tears.'

Like The Ashes of Eden (1995) did before it, The Return opens on Veridian III and continues the story of the Star Trek: Generations (1994) film. It's not a flashback narrative this time, though, it's the real deal, an actual continuation of current events.

It engineers a ridiculous scenario that brings together aspects and crew of TOS, TNG and DS9 for a ret-conning adventure that's thick with melodrama and action movie clichés. Some of the connections made are mind-blowing and may have fans either happy-clapping or furiously fighting. Either way, some of the reveals in the last quarter are extremely memorable. It's unfortunate that a large portion of the remainder of the book is such a damned chore to get through.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Third Season (2010)

The Sarah Jane Adventures:

The Complete Third Season (2010)

Dirs: Various | Episodes: 12 episodes, approx 27 mins each.

Bannerman Road's most famous resident continues the good fight. With the aid of an extraterrestrial super-computer housed in the attic, Sarah Jane Smith and her three young companions hold the line against all kinds of alien nasties that want to inhabit earth for various nefarious or profitable reasons.

The term 'alien' has negative connotations, so while it can be prudent to keep in mind Virgil's 'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' saying, it's unwise to judge on appearances, and the idiom 'don't tar all with the same brush,' is an equally relevant one.

Events in season three go back as far as 1665 and forward to 2059, with the immediate present playing a crucial role in one of the more notable two-parters, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (Dir. Joss Agnew), which has a very special guest star.