Reading/Watching Log #125

To the northern hemisphere, April means springtime and sunshine. For us in Aotearoa, it’s the start of the grim march into the depths of winter. And though I’m fully acclimatized to Christmas being a summer holiday; can handle Halloween taking place while the buds are blooming, there’s something about Easter that demands daffodils and baby chicks, none of which are anywhere to be seen at the moment. In fact, this display at the mall caught my eye, demonstrating the incongruity of the season with the holiday’s symbols:

I’ve finally reached the end of watching Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland adaptations, having completed the last three this month – including the famous MGM film, which capped the whole thing off. I’ll continue with Baum’s books, as there are still plenty of Oz stories left to be read, but I’ve since moved onto a reread of Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea books. I’ve never read the very last one in the series, though for now I’m sticking to the original trilogy.

Another theme for April is Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Having seen both The Importance of Being Earnest and a Macbeth-inspired ballet at the theatre last month, I naturally had to seek out more performances and adaptations – plus, I dearly wanted to see Hamnet, especially after Jessie Buckley’s win at the Oscars.

BBC's Robin Hood: The Bechdel Test

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the BBC’s Robin Hood, which aired its first episode on the 26th April, 2006. In the leadup to this date, I’ve been trying to think up ways of commemorating the occasion, and along with linking last year’s ranking of the show’s thirty-nine episodes on Tumblr, I’ve edited together all the scenes of the show passing the Bechdel Test:

And because I’m anal retentive about this sort of thing, here’s a second video of female characters on the show not passing the Bechdel Test:

As I’m sure you know, the Bechdel-Wallace Test is a metric designed to measure the role of women and their interactions within any give media. For a work of fiction to pass the test, it requires a) two women who b) have a conversation about c) something other than a man.

It’s obviously not a fail-proof method of ensuring that your story will be a feminist triumph, as plenty of awful films can throw in a couple of superfluous lines between two women discussing local news, while superior films can fail the test by dint of having only a single female character. It is not a way to judge the quality of stories themselves, and was never designed to be in the first place. It’s no more or less than an interesting thought experiment, and a baseline gauge of how female characters are written.

I found it quite fascinating to parse Robin Hood through the requirements of the Bechdel Test, though you won’t be surprised to learn it wasn’t a sterling example of the test in action (it clocked in at seven minutes and ten seconds of women talking to each other in a show that ran for approximately 1,755 minutes altogether). Still, sometimes you have to be realistic about what a story is trying to offer. This was always skewed towards a young male demographic, and you could probably say the same for most Robin Hood adaptations.

Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the role of women in this show, which is why I put together this edit in the first place. And I have by necessity been very generous with the conditions of the test…

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2025

Oh dear, it’s April and this post was meant to be up at the end of last year. Not that I’ve done one of these in a while, as I simply haven’t had enough material to fill up all twelve spots in a “best moments of film and television” list since 2023.

In any case, this is exactly what it says on the tin: my twelve favourite scenes, twists, moments or concepts from film or television media that was released in 2025 (though I give myself a little bit of wriggle room and occasionally allow some material from the year before)...

Woman of the Month: Nala

Nala from Sinbad 

One of my favourite things to do on these monthly posts is to showcase extremely obscure female characters, and this may well be the most obscure one I’ve ever written about. Nala, played by Estella Daniels, appeared in only seven of the thirteen episodes of Sinbad, a 2012 show that was cancelled after only one season. So, why bring her up at all?

Despite this take on the legend being all but forgotten about, Nala left an impression on me. I’ve seen the actress since then (Death in Paradise, Da Vinci’s Demons) and despite her limited screentime in this show, she’s the focus of its best episode. “Old Man of the Sea” is a variation on all those stories about Death and the Maiden, generally revolving around a plot in which the latter is forced into matrimony with the embodiment of Death (or a fey, or even the devil himself) only to outwit him at the last moment.

But Nala is also granted a sense of history and backstory the other characters don’t, as it’s clear from the very first episode that she and her father are running from something. She becomes part of the Providence crew as the requisite highborn and educated one (like Djaq or Toph) and is guided by a sense of morality and idealism. As well as her sense of entitlement, there is also duty – the very thing which prevents her from reneging on the deal her father made with Death when he finally catches up to her.

For whatever reason, Nala was written out of the show at about the halfway mark and promptly replaced by a white woman (the optics – not great), but while she lasted she was the heart of the crew. Perhaps she would have returned in time – we’ll never know.