Like The Fast and the Furious? Watch Young and Dangerous.

I've never really quite gelled with The Fast and the Furious. I saw the original film and was pretty underwhelmed: it was basically a car-centered remake of Point Break - only with less charismatic actors (Paul Walker is no Keanu Reeves, and Vin Diesel is no Patrick Swayze). The sequel, amusingly titled 2 Fast 2 Furious, was actively awful, and to be honest the franchise lost me from there. I did try watching Fast & Furious 5, but completely failed to engage with the characters or the plot and stopped watching halfway through.

Despite my own opinions, it's a crazy popular franchise. The sixth installment just broke the all-time record for a Universal Pictures opening worldwide, and a seventh is already in active pre-production. It feels odd for a movie franchise. They're churning the sequels out at an alarming rate. These days you expect there to be a 3-5 year gap between installments, but we've got a sixth film coming only two years after the fifth, which itself came only two years after the fourth, and the seventh is coming out in 2014. Something about that clicked with me; I suddenly recognised the franchise from somewhere else. This afternoon I saw an advertisement for Fast & Furious 6 on the side of a passing bus, and it suddenly occured to me.

The Fast and the Furious is America's Young and Dangerous.

Random Comic: The Great Ten #4

I love the concept of the Great Ten, the Chinese superhero team created as part of the epic weekly series 52. I'm not sure which of that title's four writers created the team, but you'd be a fool not to see Grant Morrison's fingers all over them. They are a state-supported group of 'super-functionaries', pledged to the defence of the People's Republic against alien invasion, super-powered villains and other major threats to the Chinese people.

They are outstandingly Chinese, with names like August General in Iron, Accomplished Perfect Physician and Shaolin Robot. They're steeped in Chinese mythology and culture, and are an engaging, outstandingly original twist on the standard Justice League model of superhero teams.

It was great that DC expanded the Great Ten out into their own 10-issue miniseries, unfortunately they waited an astonishing four years to do so. So much for striking while the iron was hot. In the end the miniseries sold so badly that it lost an issue and finished its run with issue #9 - which sold a horrifying 5,800 copies. I've never seen a DCU series sell that poorly.

The Pull List: 29 May 2013

Ah the dreaded 'fifth week'.

This is how it works: each comic book publisher generally operates on a four-week schedule. This is particularly true of DC and Marvel, who of course account for the vast majority of the USA's more popular comic books. So in the first week of each month DC will publish Action Comics, in the third week they're always publish Batman, and so on. That's all fine and dandy, until you come up to a month like May 2013 - which has five Wednesdays in it.

Usually this is an excuse for a big cross-over event, something favoured by DC in particular. This week, they've instead focused on publishing a bunch of special-length annuals based on a pile of comics I don't read: Red Hood and the Outlaws, Earth 2 and so on. As a result, this column - which usually features about ten comics each week - only has three books in it. I'll do my best to say a bit more than usual about them, then.

Under the cut: reviews of Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time, The Wake and X-Men.

Doctor Who: Final Thoughts on Season 7

Now that "The Name of the Doctor" has been aired, discussed and digested, it's probably a good time to look over Season 7 of Doctor Who as a whole: how is the series going?

The first thing that occurs is how difficult it is to consider this one season and not two: not only did the season get split over two years - six episodes in 2012, eight in 2013 - but each half felt completely different thanks to the change in companions. In many ways the five 2012 episodes leading up to the departure of Amy and Rory felt like an add-on to 2011's Season 6, and Season 7 only really got started with "The Snowmen" on Christmas Day. Couple that with the six-month delay from when we expected Season 7 to start (Easter 2012) to when it did start (September 2012), and the overwhelming feeling I've developed is that Doctor Who has lost a lot of momentum. Seasons 5 and 6 seemed to rattle on from one to the other, with the developing story of the Silence and attempts to kill the Doctor, and then-

Quite frankly not a lot. There was a continuing story arc to Season 7 but it felt disconnected from Seasons 5 and 6. It's somewhat like the James Bond films in recent years, where a continuing storyline developed in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and just when you'd expect the narrative would come to a rousing conclusion in Skyfall it all gets ignored for some guff about a rogue agent with a mother fixation.

Who50: "The Ark in Space"

Who50 counts down to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who by reviewing my favourite episodes and serials over the history of the programme, counting down from #50 to #1. Today, #23: "The Ark in Space", a 1975 four-part serial written by Robert Holmes and directed by Rodney Bennett.

While "Robot" was the first Doctor Who serial to star Tom Baker, it was actually made by the Pertwee era production team: producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks. This, then, marks the real beginning of the Tom Baker years, under the guidance of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes. In the first adventure together, the fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan arrive on Nerva Beacon in the Earth's far future, where the last survivors of the human race lie in suspended animation before they can finally awake and re-populate the planet. The problem is that the Doctor, Sarah and Harry aren't the first visitors to arrive, and an alien menace now threatens the entire human race.

"The Ark in Space" marks the beginning of one of the most popular periods in Doctor Who history - and with good reason. Under Hinchcliffe and Holmes' leadership the series made a three-year transition from being a science fiction series to a fully-fledged horror show for kids, albeit one still dressed very effectively with spaceships, aliens and laser guns. The way in which "The Ark in Space" develops its scares is through one of the perennial horror techniques of Doctor Who: body horror. That is, horror in which the monster does not simply stalk you - it turns you into a monster yourself.

Babylon 5: "Divided Loyalties"

Lyta Alexander, Babylon 5's original telepath, unexpectedly returns to the station. She is on the hunt for a PsiCorps sleeper agent: it could be any member of the command crew, and thanks to PsiCorps brainwashing they wouldn't even be aware they are a spy.

"Divided Loyalties" is a weird episode in so many respects. I kept wanting to like it, and it constantly evaded any attempt I made to do so. It feels like it should be a bold, provocative game changer: an episode with actual consequences, and permanent change to the series status quo. Instead it feels more than a little like an extended episode of Scooby Doo. Who is the mole? Well it's actually really obvious to anyone who watches much television, as if Straczynski looked around his cast for the most redundant character in the show and kicked them out of the nearest exit.

The Pull List: 22 May 2013

I was intrigued this weekend to see a new development for two upcoming superhero sequels: X-Men Days of Future Past and The Avengers 2. Bryan Singer has confirmed that the Marvel superhero Quicksilver will be appearing in X-Men, while Joss Whedon has confirmed that Quicksilver - and his sister the Scarlet Witch - will be appearing in The Avengers. One film's a Fox production, the other a Marvel/Disney one.

How is this possible? Well both Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch have been sitting in a sort of legal limbo for more than a decade, because while Marvel Studios retained film rights to the Avengers, they sold off the film rights to the X-Men a long time ago. Both Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are members of the Avengers, so you'd think their rights would sit with Disney, but of course they're also mutants and the children of Magneto, so you could argue they're morely likely to be owned by Fox.

It's not clear yet whether (a) there's going to be a legal stoush, or (b) that both Disney and Fox can use these characters, or even (c) that they'll use the same actors in the roles in an unofficial bit of cross-corporate synergy (doubtful). It has, however, intrigued me. Let's see what happens.

Big week this week: check under the cut for reviews of All-Star Western, Aquaman, Batman Incorporated, Daredevil, The Flash, Green Lantern, The Green Team, Journey into Mystery, The Massive, Revival, Star Wars Legacy, X-Men Legacy and Young Avengers.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

The Hobbit is, as you probably know, a 1937 childrens fantasy by author and academic J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a marvellous novel, and a childhood favourite of mine, and while it's long been overshadowed by Tolkien's subsequent epic The Lord of the Rings it remains in my opinion the best book among his works. It's breezy where Lord of the Rings is ponderous. It whips along where its sequel meanders about.

I spent many years eagerly anticipating the day when someone in Hollywood made a feature film out of The Hobbit. I was surprised some years ago when New Line Pictures allowed Peter Jackson to write and direct a three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, rather than get him to direct The Hobbit first: it could be easily adapted into a single film, was self-contained and could have made for a brilliant hit. Instead, Jackson has come to The Hobbit a full decade later, adapting it into an all-new trilogy of films to be released annually from 2012 to 2014.

The first part, An Unexpected Journey, was released into cinemas in December 2012, and onto DVD a few weeks ago. It has many great elements in it. Overall, however, it's a disastrous failure.