30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 28: Favourite character who appears in one episode.

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 28: Favourite character who appears in one episode.

Jenny, the Doctor's daughter.



From episode 4x06, "The Doctor's Daughter", of course. I loved that episode. I loved Jenny, and thought it was great to see Nigel Terry. I loved the way Donna related to both Jenny and the Doctor, and tried to reconcile them, and to find out about the Doctor's past. I loved Jenny's personality, her talents, and her fate. I loved it that Martha was in the episode, too, and did her part towards creating the peace.

I love it that Jenny is out there somewhere in the universe, having her Time Lord adventures.

I've always hoped we'll see her again.

John Constantine

I just read an item on Comics Alliance that the comic Hellblazer is being rebooted, moved from Vertigo into the DC Universe continuity, and moved to a PG rating.



This can only be a good thing.

I fell in love with John Constantine back when Alan Moore invented him in Swamp Thing - and what a wonderful comic that was. I loved him when used by Neil Gaiman in Books of Magic.

Then he got his own comic at Vertigo, and I pretty much hated it all the way. I have problems with Vertigo: maybe it was the adult rating - which in theory I'd like, right? - but it seemed to lead to comics that were dark, depressing, violent and male-directed.

The result being, as so often happens, a character I loved in the setting of other comics, failed to entertain me in his own title. Jamie Delano's Constantine was such a loser I lost interest. I still read the comic from time to time, if writers I liked - emphatically not Delano - did a run. Warren Ellis, for example. I still loved John Contantine (tough, rough, chainsmoking bisexual smart-ass that he was) but the comic has been consistently high on the two things I like least about comics - gross and violent - and low on the things I do like, like heroism and interpersonal dynamics.

So... that's comics for you. It's a wide field with something for everyone, and if I longed for the John Constantine of my dreams - a guy who looks like Sting, acts like Felix Castor, and appears in stories with plots I like - it wasn't with much hope. Constantine was what the writers and editors wanted him to be. Just another DC/Vertigo comic I didn't need to buy....

And now? Written by Jeff Lemire. Part of the regular DC run. I might just like this one.

Or is that too optimistic?

The Mandarin...

They've released publicity photos of Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin in Iron Man 3:



I've always loved Ben Kingsley, but here as The Mandarin he reminds me of how Mickey Rourke looked in Iron Man 2 - is it the scowl? The glasses? In any case... it doesn't make me feel better about the movie.

Mind you, it was just last month, on my umpteenth viewing of Iron Man, that I heard the name of the warmongering villains - the Ten Rings - and thought: "Ten Rings! Mandarin! Riiiight!"

Book commentary: Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Another urban fantasy with a female protagonist. I'm looking for something as good as Ilona Andrew's Kate Daniels series.

This isn't, but it was fun.



Protagonist October Daye (known as Toby) is a changeling who lives in San Francisco. “Changeling” means “mixed blood” - part fae, part human. When Toby was a teen with nowhere to live, she went to live in “Home”, a magical squat for runaway teen changelings, whose owner, Devin, became her first lover. After leaving him, and Home, Toby became a Knight of the local fae King – and then decided to pass as human, becoming a private eye and marrying a mortal man who had no idea of her secret. “I could explain almost anything by saying I had to work, and a lot of the time, it was the truth. It's just that sometiems my cases were more Brothers Grimm than Magnum P.I.”

And that's all before the story begins. It starts with Toby on a job, trying to find the kidnapped wife and daughter of her liege King. In doing so, she gets turned into a fish in a fish pond for fourteen years.

That brings us through chapter one.

Most of the book is about her next case. After recovering from fishhood, Toby is trying to live as mortal, making a living as a night-time cashier in a supermarket. But she Toby is forced by spell-binding (on her phone's voice mail) to take a case discovering who killed Countess Evening Winterrose, a hotshot fae California CEO. To pursue the case she must re-encounter some faces from her past (The Queen, her Lord Sylvester and his family, the king of the cat people, Devin) and some new magics and monsters. I particularly liked the Luidaeg.

The writing is bright and lively, maybe even breezy. Toby's point of view is fun, sometimes even frustrating: we know what she explains, but she doesn't explain everything, and she doesn't know everything – so we really don't even know the pattern of her universe. The setting is fun: a fairy tale mapped onto modern San Francisco. The characters are engaging, especially some of the teenagers. There is a glossary of fae races at the beginning of the book, but I found I would have preferred a list of characters.

The plot is predictable; I had the murderer guessed halfway through. And certain key elements of the story are left hanging. I would assume that the plot of Lord Sylvester's family's kidnapping and the evil Lord Simon, the fate of Toby's daughter and husband (and her mother), and her relationship with Tybalt of the Cait Sidhe, will become the focus of later books in the series.

More bothersome: Toby was a complainer. I don't think she does anything without complaining about it before had. Sure, she's hard put upon, but I wanted to say, “Shut up and stop whining.” Half the time she's being shot or beat up: a little of that went a long way. I'd have liked a lot less violence, and a protagonist who didn't find twenty things to gripe about every chapter.