The big crossover between the three previous series’ of Who and its two spin-offs, as well as the now-annual return of [insert major Who villain from the past here] (an awesome incarnation of Davros, in this case) was well-known and the major talking point beforehand, but OH MY GOD at that ending.

In these days of the Internet when every major plot twist leaks weeks and months before they happen (least of all one with as much mainstream coverage as Who), if the fact that Tennant is leaving already and will actually regenerate into someone else at the beginning of next week has been kept under wraps, the BBC has pulled off both one of the great TV rug-pulling acts in history. Not even a rumbling of a search for a new actor. Just wow…

Of course, this is the last series written by Russell T Davies, who has a quota of three gay characters and a contrived deus ex machina in every episode (the Torchwood characters fulfil the first criteria), and if anyone can write a silly way out of this he can. The fact that where we left our heroes is one second out of sync with the rest of the universe and they made a point of showing The Doctor’s disembodied hand in the episode both leave potential ways out, as do – please no – a few hints as to Donna’s future. Throw in a sonic screwdriver, the fact that this series has already had two alternate realities, and a bit reverse-polarity neutron flow technobabble and they’re quite capable of throwing it all away and getting back to the status quo.

But let’s assume, as even the BBC’s Radio Times is doing, that all is as it appears at the end of the episode. If they’re not going to undo this week’s brilliant work, it’s not only very brave to do this before the end of a series when such bombs are expected to be dropped (a season finale is not an easy place to introduce a new leading man), but also a remarkable feat of leak-plugging. Half the games industry should be taking notes.

Now let’s hope that RTD kept his nerve when he was writing…

I’d been thinking about LCDs in the 37-inch range and set myself an absolute maximum of £1,000 to spend, but when I found that decent models were well below that price (as low as £650 online), I decided to go all out. Why settle for an 8 ms response time and 8,000:1 contrast ratio when I can get 0.001 ms and 30,000:1? That’s how I came to have such a magnificent beast as the Panasonic TH-42PZ80B – that’s a 42-inch 1080p plasma, reviewed here – sat at the end of my bed.

As much as I enjoyed having the old LCD, I found that when I was watching HD video material I wasn’t really getting the full benefit. It looked sharper, but from my perch it didn’t look worlds beyond an upscaled DVD. Indeed, a competent DVD could be almost indistinguishable, which meant dropping the extra cash on the Blu-ray/HD DVD over the standard DVD was done as much for being future-proof as anything. Not to mention that black levels of LCDs have never been great (check out this comparison), which annoyed me with low detail in darker films. Batman Begins on HD DVD, for example, has a highly rated video transfer that was frankly a bit grey and murky via LCD.

Compared to the old one, this is a revelation. Watching a Blu-ray in 1080p at 24Hz with no overscan at that size would convince anyone that it’s worlds ahead of DVD, to the point where even my excellent little player upscaling to 1080p can’t keep up anymore. My go-to demo disc, Pixar’s Cars, looked amazing, with vivid colours, sharp detail and smooth motion, as did the recently acclaimed Narnia.

While the black levels are undeniably superior, it’s not all roses, though. I’ve found that I’m one of the few per cent of people who can see the phosphor trails on plasma displays, a flaw endemic to the technology. Films are largely – though not entirely – unaffected, but certain games like Call of Duty 4, with its high contrast and fast movement, can almost look like one of those red-on-green 3D double images. Thankfully it’s something that will supposedly fade as the panel wears in over the first couple hundred hours, but I’ll suppose I have to get used to it. Even so, it looks dramatically better than any LCD that I’ve seen, so I’m going to take it as a worthwhile trade.

Still, given the choice between the grey blacks, slow response and poor scaling of an LCD and the phosphor trailing of a plasma (admittedly that only a small percentage of people can even see), it kind of makes you wish that reliable old CRTs weren’t so bloody big.

The first two Terminator films are among my favourites ever and I don’t even find the third completely objectionable, but this new TV show is a blight on the series. A 9.1 user rating on TV.com? Nothing but proof that people do, in fact, have no taste. They’ll come to their senses eventually, once the novelty has worn off; it’s like when the Star Wars prequels went straight into the IMDb chart, before everyone came to their senses.

It’s not for any frivolous reason, like that Lena Headey looks distractingly not at all like Linda Hamilton (although couldn’t they have dyed her hair?). Or that Summer Glau is just playing River again. Or that the T-888 hides a pistol inside its leg, creating another plot hole to try to fill – why didn’t Arnie bring back a phased-plasma rifle in the forty watt range for any of his appearances? I can just about live with the fact that there are suddenly tons of Terminators sent back and a similar number of resistance fighters. Anything beyond Terminator 2 isn’t canon in my book, anyway. Just make it entertaining.

But this isn’t, which is the problem. Think of those little internal monologues from Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, when she was sitting and watching the terminator and John talking as she waxed philosophical about the nature of human existence – it happened maybe three times in two-and-a-half hours of film. It happens to a similar extent in every single episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and those are only about an hour. All she needs is black makeup and a MySpace account on which to write shitty poetry.

Now anyone who knows me knows how much I like Firefly – I own three copies of Serenity across two formats, and fully intend to buy the Blu-ray as well – but I just don’t like Summer Glau in this. Like I said before, she’s playing the same emotionally distant killing machine, struggling to relearn about human emotions. Expect her to either (metaphorically) descend into the smelter by the end of the series, since I don’t expect the writers to be creative enough to anything else with it. They couldn’t better the thumbs up from T2 as an emotional coda, anyway.

To be fair, I have enjoyed some moments. Despite making little real sense (a bath full of blood that attaches to him in a humanoid shape? Really?), Cromartie’s quest for some artificial flesh was reasonably effective, and given the television budget I liked his paintball mask and trench coat combo as a means to avoid showing CGI endoskeletons in every scene, in that it didn’t make me roll my eyes. Although I’ve come to love it as a plot device now, the same can’t be said for the humanoid Cylons in the new Battlestar Galactica.

But despite these flaws, I can say with absolute certainty that this will be better than the new series of Doctor Who, simply for not having any Catherine Tate. It’s undeniable.

When that’s done you need to watch this absolutely sublime parody, created by the Consolevania team:

Superb, and oh so true.

Say hello to the Topfield TF5800PVR, known to its friends as the Toppy. By day it’s a mild-manned Freeview PVR with a 160GB hard drive to record 80 hours of material, which by my calculations is how much TV I watch in about three months. It also has component output which is a great boon for an LCD TV user. This thing has some real tricks inside that bland little case, however.

First up is the USB port on the back. It’s used not only for the obvious firmware upgrades, but also to pull the recorded video off the hard drive to the computer where it can be edited, burnt to DVD, stuck on the PSP/iPod, or whatever. Obviously this in no way encourages piracy and putting copyrighted material on YouTube. Never. Not even all the weekend’s goals like they show on Match of the Day 2 in a handy two-minute package.

It’s real killer app here, though, is that it can run its own little applications known as TAPs (Topfield APplications). With some judicious tapping mine now pulls EPG data for the next two weeks from the Radio Times site instead of the basic 7-day EPG that Freeview has (this means much more extensive information including mini reviews of every film that’s on) and has a number of searches running that record anything that matches them (e.g. it searches BBC1 and BBC2 at the weekend for names beginning with “Match of the Day” that are on after 10pm, catching both versions). It also allows me to browse the listings by genre, name, and even content summaries. And that pair is just the beginning. There are tons of the things.

I only got it last Thursday (from Superfi, who were pretty good and the cheapest on Pricerunner) so I’m still learning the ropes and doing that perpetual tweaking that I do – I’ve only just become happy with the setup of my Harmony remote that I bought in March – but I’ve been well impressed with this thing. It’s a decent box on its own merits, and when you factor in the ton of extra functionality that you can download for nothing, it’s brilliant.

Forget De Niro and Pacino, because Sacha Baron Cohen may just be the best actor in the world. It’s one thing to be a great actor, immersing yourself completely in the character, when surrounded by other actors and working from a script. It’s quite another to do so with Joe Public, improvising your lines and keeping up the pretence while actually managing to keep a straight face.

Besides having possibly the best title in the world – Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan – Cohen’s latest (I’ll just call it Borat for the sake of my typing fingers) is one of the funniest films of the last few years. When Empire say that it’ll prove as timeless as Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap, I really can’t argue.

The format isn’t much different to the TV show and indeed some of the “interviews” could have been lifted from it, but this essentially adds a plot and goes further than the budget and taste constraints of television can allow. The fact that the credits name the provider of “Mr. Baron Cohen’s feces” (sic) goes some way in explaining it, as does the fact that Borat has the police called on him and is tackled by security guards on several occasions. Not always while clothed. You’ll know what part I’m talking about when you see it. It’s the part where the whole audience is crying with laughter.

Some of the funniest parts come not from Cohen himself, but from the lines that people manage to come out with on their own, exposing very real prejudices – a cowboy tells Borat that he looks Islamic and that he can’t see a Muslim without wondering what kind of bomb they’re carrying, and on several occasions advice for Jew and gypsy-killing is rendered without hesitation. These moments are not only slightly frightening, but also among the funniest in that these are lines that would be shocking if it was a comedy creation like Borat who came out with them.

While the film is offensive, it’s an equal-opportunities offender. Borat is racist, misogynistic, and totally anti-Semitic – in one scene he accuses a Jewish couple of transforming into cockroaches and throws money at them – but still manages to be endearing through sheer innocence. He does it because he doesn’t know any better rather than to be offensive. But even if one of the more outrageous outbursts hits a bit close to home for you, it stays good-natured and is still likely to be one of the funniest films you’ll see in ages.

So I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed yesterday by a stingray while filming a documentary. If you hadn’t somehow, now you have. I suppose everyone kind of expected him to get mauled by a crocodile or something one day but it’s still a shock when it happened, but at least he had the fortune to die doing what he loved most.

What’s made this strike close to home for me is that he was diving off Port Douglas in Queensland when it happened, which is exactly what I was doing almost three weeks ago. Admittedly I wasn’t provoking dangerous animals for the purpose of entertainment, but it’s a humbling idea that nature isn’t all cuddly and friendly and this could happen to anyone. Just sad that it happened to such a fun guy who did so much good work (both on TV and in conservation) and had a young family. One day after Australian Father’s Day, no less.

I guess you never know how well-liked someone really is until they die. Irwin’s always been popular but there’s just been a mass outpouring of grief. It’s been the banner headline on the CNN and Fox News sites for the past two days, a treatment that’s generally reserved for the Hollywood glitterati and major world leaders. Speaking to friends in Australia, it’s like they’ve lost a national hero which, in a way, they have.

Rest in peace, mate.

Naturally this will also lead to nobody making any more stupid urban “gangsta” games, so we all win. Do it now.

Hooray! The biggest sporting event in the world is underway and I now have at least 96 hours of football (the real one; not armoured rugby) to watch over the next month. I’m one of the 1.8 billion people watching Germany play Costa Rica at the moment (2-1 to Germany with 35 minutes played at the moment) and I’ll be switching over to Poland/Ecuador in a couple of hours. The real moment of truth for me will be tomorrow when England play Paraguay.

Either way don’t expect me to talk about too much else in the meantime. It’s not like there’s much to play at the moment, and even so I’d be dropping everything for this. Maybe I can hold a controller as I watch and pretend that it’s next-gen Pro Evo.

Anyway, in my experience it seems that even in countries where football is the meaning of life, gamers are generally one of the more apathetic groups towards it. So is anyone else out there planning on watching all that they can, just watching their team, or avoiding it like the plague? Being American is no excuse.

I’ve got a decent TV, a decent DVD player, and decent cables connecting everything into it, but the slightly incongruous link is my sound system, an Interact DSS-900, which has served me well enough for a few years but just isn’t that great. It only cost me as much as three of the digital coaxial cables that I use though, so I suppose it’s been good value.

It’s been loud enough to annoy my parents on a regular basis (late night Call of Duty 2 is a particular sore point) but it only supports Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic II which has left DTS on DVDs inaccessible and it doesn’t have a remote which means that even with my lovely Harmony I have to get up to turn it off with the rest of the system unless I want a low hum 24/7.

Anyway, with a student loan to blow I decided it was time for an upgrade, so I went for the Logitech Z-5400. It has a remote and supports DTS which is two of the criteria down immediately, it’s more powerful and so can keep family members awake even more effectively, and it has support for seven devices at once (up from three) while negating the need to flick an optical/coaxial switch hidden away on the back when I want to change between DVD and 360. At a shade under £150 I’d say it’s even better value than the £100 spent on the old one, and just look at the white-on-black LCD. Look at it. That’s worth the money alone.

Once I had it set up and found somewhere to stash the monster of a sub I got it programmed into the Harmony so that it’s turned on and inputs are switched with the rest of the system, and immediately went for some of the best sounding DVDs that I own. The main thing that struck me is quite how good the sub is, as all of the action scenes that I tried were room-shaking even with it set at under 25%. The stampede and last battle in The Lion King (don’t laugh – it has DTS on the region 2 version and even in Dolby was acclaimed as one of the most aggressive mixes around) literally shook the pictures on the wall.

The LOTR extended editions come with DTS-ES tracks so I grabbed the best one (Fellowship, in case you didn’t know) to try a few scenes. The Last Alliance in the prologue sounded great, especially the LFE when Sauron is killed, and I ended up watching the whole of Moria because I’d forgotten how good it was. Good channel separation as arrows fly past, incidentally. I’m going to watch the whole thing again because I haven’t seen it in ages.

Daredevil is the last test disc I picked up, since it features sound design befitting of a man who relies on superhuman hearing to fight crime. This impressed me in Dolby Digital when Matt wakes up blind for the first time and is overwhelmed by the sounds of the city, and that still sounds phenomenal. The first fight scene is another piece of reference-quality audio, as the mixture of gunshots, kicks, and rock soundtrack combine for one of the most pumping sub tests around with plenty of positional audio as well.

Overall I’m thoroughly impressed and I can’t imagine there being many better systems for the price. I’ve seen HTIB systems from the major manufacturers that can’t handle DTS, let alone DTS 24/96, and don’t come with subs capable of being used in building demolition. Bargain. I know I’m onto a winner when I get told to turn it down in the middle of the day.