Sunday night, SyFy premiered Alice, a miniseries based loosely on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and given the same slightly-punk treatment as 2007’s Tin Man. I reviewed the first half, which showed promise, and mentioned I was looking forward to last night’s conclusion.

Then I saw last night’s conclusion.

SyFy? We need to talk.

The milking-humans plot, which was straining credibility from the beginning, fell apart completely in the second act. Do the Wonderlandians have no emotions without human assistance? No, they seem fine. Do we see a single person in Part Two use human emotionade to enhance faculties? No, we don’t. Was this the most useless frame plot in the world? Yes, it was.

The more immediate plot is no better; the Queen and Alice snatch the ring back and forth at five-minute intervals, an entire casino of spellbound humans is awakened with a homeroom lecture about getting your head out of the clouds, and we find out that the Queen’s crack bodyguard team uses flying flamingocycles to get around.

Then again, we can’t expect too much from the Suits; when the White Knight props up some rows of skeletons and sets off some firecrackers, the Suits treat the army as a serious threat, even from such close range that you start to worry about their eyesight. (“Oh no, incredibly skinny knights are attacking!”) Later, they turn on their queen on a stern word from Alice. I feel like a little Determination Human-Extract would have gone a long way here, but now we’re applying logic to the situation, which gets us nowhere.

However, the frame plot was bad from minute one, so at least on that front there were no surprises. What was surprising was the waste of secondary characters; Harry Dean Stanton literally vanished after five minutes, the Duchess’s change of heart was nothing but a plot device in a skirt with a gonad window, and surely hiring Tim Curry for a four-hour miniseries and then using him in a single scene has to be a misdemeanor in at least five states.

The writers were able, at times, to employ a light hand, such as in their backpedaling of Jack from romantic interest to That Guy You Dated Who Helped You Move On, and the development of Hatter into a beautiful example of the beta-male hero who has a personality of his own that does not hinge on having his own way, and who actually gets the girl.

Therefore, one can only assume the writers wrote off the Resistance subplot and its characters on purpose in favor of two hours of Benny Hill chase scenes. This was probably not the best idea the writers ever had, since this means that we’re left with a lot of unanswered questions, which is always awkward when you’re trying to stage the big emotional finish.

(So the Carpenter needs Alice to wake him up to the idea of being her father so he might stop his evil ways, even though they have two undercover guys close enough to the Carpenter to just assassinate him? So the Suits don’t have a vested interest in keeping the humans around for emotionade and happily turn on their Queen because some stranger told them to? So the entire economy of Wonderland is in a shambles now? So Alice was on Narnia Time and only gone an hour, but her father’s been gone fifteen years in real time, so that’s…maybe the sort of thing a writer could answer. If only this episode had had one!)

Look here, Alice writers: you can set up as much as you want in the first half, as long as you address it in the second half. If you hope we’ll just ignore it, then you have another thing coming, because we are not going to be distracted by some nifty tri—wait, Alice and the Hatter get together after four hours of buildup? Best ever! (Damn you, sneaky writers!)

So what did you all think about Alice? Could you overlook the disastrous plot? Were you happy the White Knight didn’t go to that big chessboard in the sky, even though we all totally thought he would? Was the big reveal of Alice’s dad a genuine surprise or a dirty trick? Are you writing Alice/Hatter on your Biology notebooks right now?

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com]

SyFy aired Alice last night, and after Tin Man, you had better believe I was ready for the worst.

The worst never came! Instead, Passable came, and Passable was so much better than what I had prepared for that by the end I was like, “That was GREAT!” (It is not. It is Passable.) I reviewed it over at Tor.com.

Here, I want to break some things down, to make sure there is no confusion. The plot here is not good. The plot is stupid. The plot involves stealing people and sucking their emotions out, and weird tattoos and a big conspiracy and a magic ring and it’s just a mess. But, just like with Beyond Sherwood Forest, it’s like the producers sat down and were like, “Here are some likable characters. They’ll just run around in the woods while all the rest of it is going on. Also, we’ll reference Alice in Wonderland a lot. It should be fine!”

And so they did! (Except that dead guy. The dead guy is not likable. That dude was a jerk.)

“I’m glad that skeleton is dead, and other things that might be spoilers!”
Continue reading

Halfway through last night’s 2-hour premiere of the SyFy miniseries Alice, the Walrus and the Carpenter, reimagined as chemists in a vast laboratory of milked human emotions (don’t ask), wander through their warehouse as the Carpenter recites:

The time has come, Walrus, old friend
To test our many skills
The Oohs, the Aahs, the healing drops,
The passions and the thrills,
And see how joy and awe and lust
Can all be turned to pills.

It’s indicative of the series as a whole: numerous, often-skillful callbacks to Lewis Carroll’s books, in a setting too far from the original to feel comfortable and not quite thrilling enough to be gonzo fun. That said, the series has some redeeming features; the trick is whether they’re enough to get you to tune in for tonight’s conclusion.

Below the cut, let’s talk of pros and cons and iffy plots, of cabbages and kings!

Two years ago, SyFy (then the SciFi Channel) produced Tin Man, a miniseries that purported to update The Wizard of Oz with a gritty steampunk twist. It was a disaster, from the wooden dialogue to the nonsense plot that centered around a doomsday device designed to cast the world into darkness for reasons no one ever bothered to explain. Even roping in some vaguely A-list actors (the wasted Zooey Deschanel, the doing-his-best Alan Cumming) couldn’t help them; the series buckled almost immediately under the weight of its own ambition and never recovered.

It’s unfortunate, since The Wizard of Oz’s plot is a straightforward gather-your-allies adventure that would seem to lend itself very well to adaptation. The Alice books, which by comparison scamper aimlessly in a surrealist playground, would seem a trickier animal to adapt wholesale, and has generally been more successful when it appears as a callback in a larger piece. The Matrix is an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, from the White Rabbit right on down the line.

…Which is interesting, since this Alice also features a totalitarian regime that artificially drains humans’ emotional energy for their own sustenance, complete with a ragtag resistance determined to make good. (Awkwaaaard.)

The setup: Alice, a martial-arts instructor, gets commitment-shy with her new boyfriend when he offers her a ring. It’s for the best, since he’s kidnapped immediately afterwards (some men are just trouble). In chasing down his captors, Alice falls through a magic mirror into a Wonderland that’s gone to seed, 150 years after “the other Alice” turned everything on its head. Now human “oysters” (I see what you did there!) are stolen from our world and put into The Casino, a supernatural Vegas in which everyone wins every time so that their positive emotions can be mined for the use of Wonderlanders, who trade the multicolored thrills like currency. (Also, Alice’s father is missing, which is treated like a legitimate B-plot instead of one of the most overused and unnecessary tropes in the business.)

There’s almost nothing of Wonderland in the plot. It’s in the details that you recognize Carroll: Alice propping up her long limbs in a shrinking room; an encounter with a remarkably faithful Jabberwocky; an unsettling Tweedledee and Tweedledum; a murderous March Hare with a ceramic rabbit’s head; an underground password about a little crocodile; a Dormouse in charge of a Tea Party that’s a speakeasy stock market in disguise. The series is packed to the gills with references to Alice, which, if you can ignore the laughable A-plot, are fun to come across.

It takes a good actress to handle all this nonsense with grace. Luckily, as played ably by Caterina Scorsone, Alice is up to the task. Her Alice is rash (obligatory, since for any Alice we need the kind of girl who’s willing to chase people into dark alleys), but she’s also no dummy; she picks locks, she knows when to lie, and she can even accept help when she needs it.

Help, in this case, comes from the Hatter, a boyband-ified resistance-fighter incarnation of Carroll’s anarchist host. However, Andrew Lee Potts (one of many SyFy contract players in this miniseries) does the best he can, and gives real feeling to the tentative friendship that develops with Alice as they go on the lam. (If they’re going for a love triangle, then tonight’s conclusion better have more appearances by the fleeting Philip Winchester as Jack; it’s a rough gig to disappear for ninety minutes at a time and hope viewers still want you to get the girl.)

Of course, these three actors form the Taking This Seriously trifecta. The rest of the roll call—Kathy Bates, Colm Meaney, Matt Frewer, and Tim Curry—got scripts with a note that read HAM INSIDE. Each is gleefully committed to the material, overacting as hard as possible any time the camera’s on them. Tim Curry, woefully underused, still walks off with the trophy, and Kathy Bates almost makes up for her hideous half-assed Queens’ robes with a performance that’s both camp and vaguely creepy. (Matt Frewer’s pathos as the White Knight, Wonderland’s last remaining paladin, is also successful; he’s another one I want more of tonight.)

Last night left viewers hanging (and Alice quite literally so); and despite the uneven pacing and heavy-handed infodumping in the series’ first half, I’ll be tuning in tonight because I want to know how it all unfolds, which is more than I can say about SyFy’s last miniseries. Alice: Upgrade.

Alice airs tonight on SyFy; the first half reruns at 7pm Eastern time, and the second half premieres at 9pm Eastern.

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com.]

This weekend, SyFy gave us all Beyond Sherwood Forest. As I said over at Tor.com, it was the first good SyFy original production I’ve ever seen. (No, Tin Man does not count. It will never count. All it did was turn me away from Neal McDonough forever. Now, when I watch Band of Brothers, all I think is, “Shit, dude, you have no idea what’s going to happen to your career, do you?” and then I’m sad.)

You have to admit they’re trying for quality, though! They even have moody promo stills. (Well, one moody promo still. So they’re trying…barely.)

1. Robin Dunne. He isn’t British, and he doesn’t try. He frowns manfully, he wears tunics, he shoots arrows, and we’re done. (Extra points for not taking the dragon CGI seriously at all, but making more of an effort to take Volturi Druids seriously because they were real actors and you wanted to pretend they were important. Manners!)

2. The dual plots. One of them is: guerilla response to government tyranny sometimes backfires on the populace, and the outlaws who have the populace’s best interests at heart must come to terms with the idea that their actions have consequences for others and deal with those consequences accordingly.

The other one is: illegitimate Volturi Druid turns into a dragon in the sunshine and fights a magic portal.

These plots are utterly separate, except once or twice when the Robin Hood crew halfheartedly waves some sticks in the direction of what was probably some stunt guy in a scuba suit. The dragon stuff was clearly added to sell this script to SyFy, and that’s fine with me.

3. The production values. Sure, Marian’s peasant-blouse-and-corset ensemble is ridiculous and her cloak looks like it was appliquéd by Mrs. Hanover’s sixth-grade class, but Robin looks GREAT for a SyFy movie!

It’s all earth-toned and vaguely worn and it’s just several layers of stuff sort of tacked together with belts and laces instead of big buckles and rivets and random studded bands! I’m not saying it’s period-accurate, I’m just saying:

Let he who is without rivets cast the first stone.

4. That bit illustrated in the Tor.com review when Robin aims his flaming arrow. I laughed out loud, and I am not even ashamed. Peter DeLuise, you have a sense of humor.

5. Julian Sands. Julian Sands actually believes there is a dragon. Julian Sands probably actually stabbed that poor girl once or twice for “realism.” Julian Sands is going to commit to this movie the way he committed to all the other movies: stoned out of his gourd.

As for the dragon, which looks suspiciously Aztec Rex-y in the face and moves like a Tonka Toy, I couldn’t find a picture. It looks like this:

…yeah. There’s just no help for it. Let it go, Jake. It’s SyFyTown.

Syfy’s weekly original movies are generally good for two things:

1) Mansquito.
2) Saying, “Sure, this is bad, but it’s no Mansquito.”

However, even SyFy’s single-minded quest to make the worst movies ever hit a snag this weekend, when they presented Beyond Sherwood Forest. It’s Robin Hood, with a dragon, and it should have been awful.

Shockingly, it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it was no great shakes either, but it was just as entertaining as any episode of the recent BBC series. Better, it felt like there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of the trappings of the legend. (The blatant Prince of Thieves moment above is followed by the slow-motion path of the arrow…which bounces harmlessly off the dragon as Robin looks on, dismayed. Reader, I cracked up.)

So, if even SyFy can make a decent Robin Hood flick, that begs the question: what makes a legend tamper-proof?

The easy answer to the first question is that no legend is tamper-proof; Prince of Thieves beat the Robin Hood legend to a bloody pulp fifteen years ago. However, unlike other legends that have been buried by bad movie adaptations (Dear Greek Myths: so sorry about Troy), Robin Hood seems to survive all the spoofs and TV series that can be thrown at it, and Beyond Sherwood Forest is no exception.

See, Julian Sands is creepy. (Well, also his character is, but that’s incidental.) He kills Robin’s father and chases Robin into the woods, where little Robin grows into a comely outlaw whose Sanctuary contract must have had a rider that begins, “Sooooo, we do these weekly movies…”

Meanwhile, the equally comely Maid Marian (Erica Durance, immune to awful scripts from all that Smallville) runs away from her arranged marriage, joins forces with the woodland outlaws, and gets caught up in backlash from a populace whose ties with Robin have made them a government target.

Also, there’s a young lady vampire Druid who turns into a dragon in the sunshine and works for Julian Sands because he tore her heart out and is holding it hostage in the basement of the castle. You know, the usual.

Partially, this movie skims above the rest of the SyFy muck because it doesn’t make the mistake of trying to be more than it is; it’s a B-movie and knows it, and even though people are constantly stabbing an invisible dragon, you get the idea that they were all in it for the free trip to Prague. (Except Julian, who looks like he really believes there’s a dragon, because that’s how he rolls.)

But in another smart move, the movie itself sidelines the dragon until it needs an excuse for CGI or a reason for vampire Druids to be hanging out in Sherwood Forest. (That’s how you know it’s a SyFy movie.) But the A-plot is largely what every Robin Hood movie is about: the struggle of a few good-hearted outlaws with superhuman fighting abilities going up against the tyranny of an illegitimate governor.

It’s an odd choice for a SyFy premise, except that Robin Hood already slides close to the edge of the fantasy line with his preternatural abilities and +10 charisma. (Peter S. Beagle nailed it with his ghostly Robin Hood procession in The Last Unicorn: too fantastic, even in a fantasy world.) Really, is it only strange that no one added dragons to this guy a little sooner?

Recent remakes of Robin Hood have focused on the gritty realism of the legend; the BBC series paints Robin has a traumatized war veteran, and Ridley Scott’s upcoming take handles the idea of a hero whose best days are behind him. But Robin Hood is, at heart, an escapist fantasy; his legend centers on unbelievable abilities, a supporting cast Joss Whedon would envy, and his success through chivalry (a code of behavior more often lauded than practiced). He was, like most folk heroes, more than human; and what better fantasy than that?

Also, this one time, he fought a dragon.

[This piece originally appeared at Tor.com.]