Ah, but this is the good stuff! Foley delivers a tremendous script as always, Richardson is excellent, and Aldred is, well, Aldred. But god is the character stuff brilliant. The horrible beautiful stuff about soldiers, the stuff with Dana, the idea of the Obscura, it's all wonderful. Short of going in depth into the narrative craft here, that's all I really have to say. Oh, but it's good.

That was alright. Bit boring, and nothing much to write home about, but a fun enough way to spend a half hour if one has nothing better to do. Unfortunately, there are rather a lot of better things one could be doing, as enjoyable as it is to hear Romana and Leela having fun messing everything up on Gallifrey. (They are delightfully gay.) It does well enough selling the tragedy of the impending War, but there's so many better ways they could have done it. There's certainly the bones of a good story in there, but all the individual bits were just sort of lacking. And given current events, a governing system letting anyone have asylum so easily feels very unrealistic *cries*. But it was alright.

The thing about *Portents* is that there's the shadow of a good film in there. Like, the idea of this strange otherworldly man, this Stranger, if you will, dropping in out of nowhere and falling in love with you and charming you until you almost fall in love with him is very *Torchwood*, and fits in very nicely with the whole otherworldly feel of *PROBE*. The direction is good, Solomon's acting is occasionally vaguely passable (but Baggs's sets new records for how flat it is actually possible to deliver a line), and Evil Creepy Giles is actually played quite well. The music is likewise good, the dialogue and CGI abysmal, and the ending a complete nothing, but ultimately this has the vibe of a charming queer student film, and it's none the worse for it. Ultimately, it's largely very bad, but it does end up being *interesting*, and I think that's somewhat commendable, and I can't help being somewhat charmed by it, especially with how off the wall it gets at times.

Incredible, incredible book. Just an insanely well-written fascinating meditation on violence. It occasionally verges on Von Dannikenism, but I think it mostly manages to avoid it. Very, very interesting, Kate Orman is just an incredibly good writer.