Frontier in Space

Frontier in Space is easily my least favorite Third Doctor story so far. It's barely even a story. I've read some reviews that praise this serial for embracing space opera elements, but I think that's horseshit. Frontier in Space is basically a series of holding cells. The Doctor and Jo are imprisoned several times in at least five separate locations across the six episodes. And while I recognize that getting captured is one of the show's most well-worn tropes, this serial just takes it too far. Also, this story is meant to connect to the following story, Planet of the Daleks, but it's set up in an incredibly lazy way. Other than a brief mention that the Master is acting on another party's behalf, the Daleks are only seen in the last ten minutes of the sixth episode. Frontier in Space doesn't even really have a proper ending. The Master shoots the Doctor, the Doctor and Jo escape in the TARDIS and we never find out what happens to the Master, the Doctor's friends or the looming war between Earth and Draconia.

Rating: You're wasting your time%

Star Trek - "Dagger of the Mind"

Kirk beams down to a space prison with a lieutenant he drunkenly slept with at the ship's Christmas party but it turns out the prison is engaging in some cruel and/or unusual punishment. Bonus points for Kirk getting rescued by a woman for a change!

RATING: 71%

Enterprise S1E20 - "Detained"

Hey it's Al from Quantum Leap playing an evil internment camp warden! Some good political conceptualizing as the United States was just entering the "war on terror" but the episode is sort of boring.

RATING: 40%

Prison Tattoos

I deal with a lot of truckers at my job and I've come to notice that a lot of said truckers have prison tattoos. You know what I'm talking about, the faded and hastily scrawled tattoos that look like they were made with a safety pin, a ballpoint pen and something that was fermented in a bucket behind a radiator. Sometimes you see the classic LOVE and HATE knuckle tattoos, sometimes its a crude approximation of a cartoon character and sometimes its just some entirely cryptic symbol. Whenever you see someone with prison tattoos, you can be sure that there's a story behind that ink. You can also be sure that I won't be the one to ask them for that story.

Rating: Depends on how scary the guy looks%

(Image from channel4.com)