October 2011 – Page 2 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 4

“As punishment for recent actions of the British government, Trafalgar Square will be attacked at 6pm… And MI5 will let it happen.”

Looks like I was indeed a little wide of the mark last week when I theorised that Dimitri was being shaped up into the central figure of Spooks this year. It turns out that the writers are going for more of an ensemble approach; last week was “the Dimitri episode”, and this week’s, it soon became clear, was “the Erin episode”. Much emphasis on Erin in the “previously on…” bit was then followed by a sinister man in a car spying on her leaving home and promising that “the woman will be taken care of”, as if to hammer the Erin-centric nature of the story home.

It’s an interesting way to approach the storytelling, in that it’s focussing primarily on the characters. This may explain, why, yet again, the central character this week was allowed to develop by means of a plot that is very familiar ground to Spooks fans. Erin was thrust into the foreground of that old Spooks stalwart, the “thwart Muslim extremists” plot, as an imprisoned Abu Hamza-like cleric groomed the soon to be released inmates at his prison into jihadi suicide bombers.

This caused much tokenistic soul-searching as characters turned into political mouthpieces for the writers. Meeting with the Home Secretary, Harry expressed concern at a violent cult leader being locked in an environment full of vulnerable, impressionistic young men; basically, his own ripe recruiting ground. The Home Secretary countered by outlining the alternative of allowing him out and inflaming all the country’s right wingers. Some relief from this rather simplistic pontificating was offered by the Home Secretary’s weary admission that it was a no-win scenario: “I get rather a lot of those.” Simon Russell Beale’s world-weary delivery was pitch-perfect, and almost made you feel some sympathy for career politicians. Only almost, though, the writing’s not that good.

Back at the Grid, Dimitri and Calum engaged in a similar discussion, culminating in an uncharacteristically liberal outburst from Calum: “3% of the country is Muslim, but they make up 11% of the prison population. Maybe we should start with that.” It’s a tricky line that shows like Spooks and 24 have to walk when presenting Islamic extremists as their villains, and it’s become de rigueur for the writers to add a bit of debate to display that they’re not trying to characterise all Muslims like this, while not ignoring that some of them are. This tends to lead to some very out of character mealy-mouthed platitudes in the dialogue. While I recognise the perceived necessity for it, this often comes across as ham fisted, and Spooks was no exception this week, though thankfully it didn’t descend into the near-offensive cultural stereotyping that became a hallmark of 24.

But thankfully, we didn’t have to linger long on the cultural philosophy. This is Spooks, not Newsnight, and there had to be enough time left in the episode for the requisite running around, peering at CCTV footage and shooting guns. Thus it was that we discovered one of the two potential jihadis being released from Eastland Prison was actually one of Erin’s assets, supplying her with information from inside the prison in exchange for a promise that his daughter would be allowed to move to the UK from their home in Pakistan.

The script didn’t linger on the statement that this man, Ashur Mohali, was a university lecturer in Pakistan who’d been arrested for illegal menial work in the UK; that was one of the political points better handled, left hanging there for you to make your own judgement. Slightly less well-handled was his impassioned plea to his fellow jihadi, a former BNP member turned Muslim convert, that what they were doing was wrong according to so many tenets of the Qu’ran. All true enough, but again it felt like the point was being hammered home.

Unfortunately for Ashur, his handler Rashaida (the impressively sinister Chu Omambala, who we’d seen spying on Erin earlier) wasn’t the trusting type, and he’d kidnapped Ashur’s daughter in order to ensure that Ashur would go through with the plan. This led to much hand-wringing from Erin, who’s obviously still ridden with guilt about having screwed over another of her assets a couple of weeks ago. Lara Pulver is rather better at portraying inner doubt and guilt than Max Brown, so we actually felt for her as she begged Harry to petition the Home Secretary for help: “Just once, I’d like to fulfil the promises we make to those who are risking their lives for us.”

This showed that The Harsh Realities of the Job still aren’t fully clear to her. For Erin , one of those Harsh Realities is being really, really unlucky, as not only was she in the process of ruining yet another life, the job came perilously close to home when Rashaida kidnapped her daughter too. Double daughter jeopardy! It wasn’t made clear exactly how Rashaida managed to get his hands on her; I suppose it’s possible that he killed Erin’s mum to get her out of the way, as we didn’t see her again. I’d like to think that the writers wouldn’t be so cruel, as Erin’s already having enough bad luck to make her envy Job. But this is Spooks, and nobody gets a happy ending here, so who knows?

Much peering into CCTV monitors and running around council estates throwing guns hither and yon for the local kids to pick up ensued, as Dimitri was again relegated to thumping people and shooting. It all culminated in an admittedly tense standoff in Trafalgar Square (the location being announced by hyperdramatic music accompanying shots of Nelson’s Column and stone lions), as Erin begged Harry to wait for Dimitri to rescue her daughter before shooting down poor old Ashur to stop him detonating a big strap on bomb. Dimitri, of course, got there in the nick of time. Ashur was duly dispatched, and Erin’s conscience got some salving from hearing that Ashur’s daughter, rescued by MI6, was on the next plane over. Mind you, with Erin’s luck, she’ll probably be the one who has to explain to the girl about where her father is.

As mentioned, Lara Pulver conveys emotion rather better than Max Brown, so her tearful near-resignation after all of this was perfectly believable – even if her immaculate hair remained unruffled throughout. Erin’s a bit of a daft character, of course; an impossibly glamourous single mum who saves the country on a weekly basis and still has perfect hair, she certainly outdoes the responsibility juggling of Sarah Jessica Parker in the execrably titled I Don’t Know How She Does It. But Lara Pulver’s been likeable enough to make you overlook the absurdity, and it seems rather a shame that, this being the last series, we won’t see very much of her. She’ll never be in the same formidable league as the much-missed Ros Myers, but she seems to be shaping up into an interesting character.

In fact, more than anything else, the introduction and beginnings of development of two new main characters seems the clearest sign that this probably wasn’t originally intended to be the show’s last series. Why start developing new characters at this stage of the game? Calum, of course, is a necessary replacement for Tariq, whose death was vital for the standard shock value of a Spooks Big Plot. And presumably Erin was brought in because it would have been less than credible for the team to be as small as four people and still protect the realm with the reliability of five people (a fact Calum drew attention to with an in-jokey line about the five of them against the CIA).

The fact remains though that this series seems like it’s trying to take the characters somewhere, as if news of the show’s cancellation didn’t reach the writers until after they’d finished. As I said last week, given the familiarity of the ground we’ve been treading, the show’s demise may not be a bad thing. But I sincerely hope news of its end reached the writers in time to craft a proper end for the Big Plot – particularly since this year’s Big Plot must also resolve the several years of simmering but chaste romantic tension between Harry and Ruth.

Thankfully, the Big Plot was much more to the fore this week, as Ruth continued to struggle with her decision to take a job with the slimy Home Secretary and her growing distrust of Harry. This was underlined in a sweet scene, perfectly played by Peter Firth and Nicola Walker, as Harry and Ruth met on a park bench to discuss her misgivings. Ruth’s been picking the brains of CIA friend turned bad guy Jim Coaver, on a bridge over the Thames (“What is it with you Brits and hanging out by this river?” asks an exasperated Coaver in yet another in-joke about the tropes of the show). Coaver dropped some heavy hints about Harry’s bad boy past with Elena in the 80s, and Ruth, already feeling like “the other woman” is starting to feel that she doesn’t know Harry anywhere near as well as she thought she did.

Here was the real acting muscle of the show, as Firth and Walker subtly conveyed so much turmoil on such rigidly controlled, British faces. “You can’t love someone on a need to know basis,” said a frustrated Ruth, to which Harry was equivocal; clearly that’s always been a condition of his romantic relationships. But Harry’s love has no plausible deniability as he urged Ruth to take the Home Secretary’s job offer: “I don’t want you caught up in what’s coming.” Clearly Harry’s about to get badass again – time to break out the murdering gloves.

For it now seems undeniable that the CIA are the bad guys, trying to overthrow the uneasy detente with the Russians. Harry discovered this by the rather dubious means of coaxing them into taking potshots at his old flame Elena, after using her to misinform them about discovering the identity of the source posing as Harry. Wheels within wheels, it seems, as the CIA assassin was directed by an unseen car driver; the same car, Ruth later discovered, habitually used by Coaver (though given her suspicions, that one to one meeting on a bridge seems a little foolhardy).

So Harry finally squared up to his old buddy, with much philosophising about the nature of friendship versus The Harsh Realities of the Job: “I’d never shoot my friends. My family, maybe, but never my friends.” Coaver’s protestations of ignorance seemed fairly convincing, and after all, it might not necessarily have been him in the car directing the assassin. But that’s cutting no ice with Harry, whose judgement is being made to look increasingly shaky. Coaver’s got 24 hours to come clean, or Harry’s coming after him: “I guess you’ve forgotten who I work for.” “Then I’ll have to come after them too.”

So is Harry coming unglued? Or is this going to be his last blaze of righteous glory as he claims vengeance and justice in a way that the Home Secretary will presumably not approve of? With only two episodes left, it looks like the focus is going to be squarely on the Big Plot from hereon in; if nothing else, that’s a mercy for sparing us an episode centred on Calum. There’s plenty to tie up, so two episodes is probably necessary. Along with the duplicitous CIA and the inscrutable Russians, Harry has to come clean to his unsuspecting son and choose between the two women in his life before, very probably, dying a hero’s death. Let’s hope the writers are up to the task of giving this most British of heroes a proper send off. And not end the whole series on a cliffhanger because they didn’t realise it had been cancelled!

The Fades, Episode 3

“The things that scare you about me… Imagine I’m Stevenage. Some things have changed about me, but fundamentally I’m just ordinary. I’m Stevenage.”

Things continue to rattle along at an extraordinary pace in this week’s episode of The Fades, both in the supernatural thriller and ordinary suburban life aspects of the plot. It’s a testament to the quality of Jack Thorne’s writing that he’s able to pack so much incident into one hour of television and still retain so much character depth without that pace ever dragging (yet).

The style continues to be a combination of Skins-like teen drama crossed with classic children’s fantasy, in the most enjoyable of ways. After having decided to try and live a double life in his capacities of normal teenage nerd and Chosen Being of Destiny, teenage hero Paul falls at almost the first hurdle in a classic secret identity fail. What with last week’s references to Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Alan Moore, and this week’s to Neil Gaiman, it’s becoming clear that another of Jack Thorne’s influences is comic books, and every superhero, in comics and films, must at some point face the plotline of people finding out who they really are.

For Paul, this happens at comically inconvenient times, as he begins to discover new aspects of his powers. We first encounter him this week indulging in the normal practice of most teenage boys – having a wank, while fantasising about his sister’s best friend Jay. For most teenagers, this would end by reaching to the nightstand for the Kleenex, but for Paul, his climax results in him suddenly growing a huge pair of angel wings, which might have been even harder to explain if his mum had caught him at it.

This led to one of the best lines in the episode, as Jay asked whether she should know anything about him: “When I ejaculate I grow wings.” It’s a sign of Paul’s nascent confidence with girls that he can mention ejaculation, but Jay obviously takes the “growing wings” part as a surreal gag. She soon learns better when Paul’s reliably bitchy sister Anna and her truculent Scouse boyfriend find Paul and Jay snogging. Finally driven to uncontrollable anger at Anna’s fairly horrible sniping, Paul unintentionally wields his glowing-palm power to literally seal her mouth shut.

So the cat’s out of the bag, and pretty early on too. Paul manages to reverse the trick – though we aren’t shown how – but three more people now know that he’s not quite the normal teenage nerd he seems. This scene is classic wish-fulfilment stuff, familiar to every downtrodden teenage geek who reads fantastic stories; the moment when the wimpy hero finally stands up to the bullies by displaying his superpowers. But Thorne wrongfoots the comic fan here by actually going on to humanise his bully, as we start to learn that Anna is so nasty to Paul simply because she feels excluded by him in their family. Finally given some depth to play with in her character, Lily Loveless excels this week, showing more of the undoubted talent we saw in Skins.

What with his powers out of control and beginning to have his first sexual experiences, Paul is pretty neglectful of his best friend Mac, continuing the thread we saw last week. This week, it’s Mac’s birthday, but nobody’s remembered. His mum hasn’t sent a card, his policeman dad is totally preoccupied with the mysterious disappearances and murders clogging his casebook, and now even his best friend is too busy to be there for him.

Daniel Kaluuya continues to be the best thing in the show in his funny, sensitive and heartfelt performance as Mac, with his constant stream of pop culture references. The relationship between him and Paul is a beautifully portrayed teenage friendship, of the kind that is never as intense again after one of the friends discovers girls. A later scene with Paul spells out the sort of feelings we all had at that age, which we never really recaptured: “You know, whatever happens with Jay, you know you’ll always be more important to me.” Of course Mac mocks him by asking if they’re in love, “cause I’m flattered, but…”, but their relationship is convincingly real and intense, and beautifully played by both actors.

With Paul having finally remembered Mac’s birthday (a day late) and made apologetic amends, Mac repays the favour by helping him win back the (understandably) freaked out Jay, in a scene which is an unashamed but enjoyable ripoff of Cyrano de Bergerac (though Mac probably thinks of it as 1987 movie Roxanne). Perched up a tree, Paul follows the hidden Mac’s prompts to charm Jay by comparing himself to a space probe; perfectly in keeping with what we know about both boys.

It probably helps that the tree magically blossoms purely as a result of Paul sitting in it; what girl could fail to be charmed by that? Obviously Jay is, as within a few scenes she’s in Paul’s bed and taking his virginity, in a depiction of first time sex that’s both sweet and funny. And luckily for Paul, this time wings don’t shoot out at the all-important moment. Mind you, it’s an echo of Skins once again that they’ve gone from Paul’s first kiss a couple of nights beforehand to full on sex so quickly – but as Jay comments, “it’s not 1955… people don’t have to wait any more.”

What with Paul having a fairly eventful teenager’s life, he doesn’t find much time to pick the phone up to Neil. Which is unfortunate, because over in the supernatural part of the plot, things aren’t going too well for the Angelics. Neil wasn’t actually killed by the hungry gang of Fades last week (and there’s still a question as to why), but his stomach’s been pretty nastily mauled. Being the tough hardcase he is, he eschews hospital in favour of sewing up his own guts in the back of his pickup, an inadvisable medical technique for anyone.

Fortunately, when he inevitably collapses, Paul has turned up, and it’s time for him to exercise the healing power we discovered he had last week. Not only does he manage to heal Neil’s wounds, he also sorts out the eye that was damaged in episode 1’s Fade attack. Fade-Helen is impressed – “He’s done more than I ever could” – and advises him to just let it come when the inevitable live moth crawls out of his mouth: “Tickles, doesn’t it?” Daniela Nardini as Helen has been a highlight of the show for me, as I used to love her as Anna in This Life, so when she finally ‘ascended’ it felt like rather a shame. Whatever the show’s take on the afterlife is, it’s pretty definitive that there’s no coming back from that. Johnny Harris too played that scene beautifully, tearing up as Neil revealed that he didn’t feel strong enough to deal with things without her.

Indeed, Neil’s been humanised quite a bit from the initial armed supernatural warrior we first met. This week, he also tries to sort things out for Fade-Sarah and her distraught husband Mark, by first convincing Mark that his dead wife is hanging around him then acting as translator so they can have a chat. Whatever Neil’s conscience might be telling him, it’s hard to disagree with Fade-Helen that this might not be the best course of action. Mark now knows that his wife’s ghost is hanging around him unseen at all times, which is hardly going to help him move on!

Neil’s also decided that he can’t handle everything by himself, and summoned “the rest of the Angelics”, which is just as well as it’s hard to be a secret society all by yourself. As it turns out, “the rest of the Angelics” is only another four people, but hey, every bit of reinforcement helps. They’ve hatched a plan to try and interrogate one of the weaker Fades by capturing it, and inevitably it’s Neil’s ex Natalie that they grab. Interrogation is possible because the Fades’ consumption of human flesh has not only given them corporeal bodies, they can now talk too – or, in Natalie’s case, scream. One wonders whether next week’s interrogation will show the Angelics as not being the all-out good guys we thought they were…

That may not be foremost on Paul’s mind, though. In a moment that was genuinely shocking, while horseplaying with Mac, Paul absently wandered onto a road and was hit by a truck for his inattention. Coming so abruptly after a heart to heart two-handed scene with his best friend, this was a real jolt that made you realise how likeable Paul is, and how much I at least had emotionally invested in the character. It’s also a mark of how well this series mixes the supernatural and the mundane that the Chosen Hero, marked for death as an Angelic, is seriously injured by something as normal as not paying attention to the traffic.

The throw-forward to next week is deliberately cagey about Paul’s chances, as it should be. There are a couple of shots of him unconscious in a hospital bed, but no more. Of course, as the hero of the show, and a superpowered one to boot, I think we can safely say that he’ll be back in action before long. But it’s a measure of how well the show does suspense that I had to think a moment to remember that.

If and when he’s back on his feet, though, he’s going to have more problems than he expects. His dreams of the ash-covered apocalypse have come back, with the added detail of a mysterious young man who tells him that, “it’s all inevitable, you know.” Meanwhile, the bald, emaciated Fade who’s been so terrifying in leading the attacks has been spending this episode actually pupating, hanging in a slimy cocoon from the roof of a tunnel.

The episode climaxed as the cocoon hatched, and out slid a rather sexy nude man, seen only from behind. With Paul on the verge of death, my first thought was to wonder if he’d somehow switched places with the Fade leader. But no, as I perhaps should have guessed (and might have if I’d recognised him in Paul’s vision), it’s yet another member of the Skins cast! Yes, through some process as yet unclear, the Fade leader has remoulded himself as a rather buff looking Joe Dempsie. Joe has never looked so good – and as he turns and snarls at the camera, his eyes turning yellow, he’s never looked so scary either.

Three episodes in, and The Fades has become must-watch TV, for me at least. Its irresistible combination of teenage soap, Being Human-like supernatural drama and classical children’s quest story make it one of the most enjoyable shows around at the moment. And the concepts continue to get screwier and more imaginative each week. I’m really looking forward to finding out what happens next; and whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t be easily predictable!

Terra Nova: The past’s so bright, I gotta wear shades

In uncertain, frightening times, it’s always been human nature to hark back to a better, brighter past. Heck, that’s virtually the mantra of the Republican Party. Thus it was that, in a world choked by overpopulation and pollution, a group of scientists and idealists hatched a plan. With time travel tech, they would project a select group of humans back to an unspoiled Earth in a Golden Age before humanity evolved to wreck everything, and give them a second chance to remake the world.

Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the plot of 1973 Doctor Who story Invasion of the Dinosaurs. But fast forward to 2011 and it’s also the plot of glossy, expensive new Fox TV show Terra Nova, the first two-part story of which was shown on Sky last night. Evidently someone at Fox remembered Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Equally evidently, they remembered how terrible the dinosaurs in it actually looked, and went running to Steven Spielberg – after all, Jurassic Park was pretty popular, so that guy must know how to do dinosaurs, right?

Onboard as executive producer, with Amblin Entertainment getting a co-production credit, Spielberg must have had some creative influence here. Unfortunately, like previous Spielberg ventures into the world of television, Terra Nova is a case where throwing lots of money at the production is no substitute for originality and decent writing. It’s exciting enough, but so formulaic it could have been written by a computer. Or, as in the case of this opening story, by a team of four writers – and drama writing by committee is never a good idea.

Unlike Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which took the view that our present world was nasty enough to want to escape from, Terra Nova opens in “The 22nd Century”, which anyone would want to escape from since it’s basically a Greatest Hits compilation of every sci-fi dystopia you ever saw. There are vast, sprawling high rise cities (like in Blade Runner), choked by overpopulation (like in Soylent Green) and pollution (like in No Blade of Grass and, er, Soylent Green again). Families live crammed into one room apartments, into which at any moment black-clad secret police (like in Blake’s 7) may burst to search for illegal third children (like in Zero Population Growth). They’re only lucky they’re not being troubled by rebellious super-intelligent apes.

One of the illegal families is Chicago’s Shannon family. The Shannon family are like a perfect combination of every stock character American TV can offer. Dad Jim (the stolidly bland Jason O’Mara, last seen in the equally bland US version of Life on Mars) is a cop. Mum Elizabeth (Shelley Conn out of Casualty and Mistresses, thankfully allowed to retain her British accent) is a doctor. They have a rebellious teenage son, Josh (Landon Liboiron out of Degrassi: The Next Generation, and a more studious shy teenage daughter, Maddy (Naomi Scott out of… nothing I’ve seen, actually). The only way they could be a more perfect balance of stock TV characters would be if illegal third child Zoe (Alana Mansour) was a lawyer. Which she isn’t, thankfully, because as a five-year-old she has too much integrity.

Having established the most formulaic TV family they could find (compared to these guys the Robinsons out of Lost in Space were punk heroes), the writers then have Jim put in jail for a couple of years for illegally fathering a third child. It seems odd that the child itself isn’t punished by say, death, as would be logical in such a dystopia, but that kind of darkness has no place in such a breezy family show. After two years, his wife comes to visit and drops him a laser cutting device inside a thoughtful present. Plainly the guard haven’t been watching enough prison movies, as this age-old cliche has Jim out of the futuristic hi-tech prison by the next scene. Stopping just long enough to exchange a conveniently available large sum of cash for his little daughter stuffed inside a backpack, he hotfoots it to join his family.

Because all of this – the stock family, the dystopia, the not-as-good-as-Blade Runner CGI metropolis – is just the setup. Jim’s family have been selected to join the “Tenth Pilgrimage”, the tenth group of humans to take advantage of an oh so convenient time anomaly that can take them on a one way trip to the Cretaceous period. Casually knocking aside a few suspicious (and inept) security guards, Jim joins his family in leaping through something that is presumably legally distinct from the Stargate, and hey presto! they’re in dino world.

Because that’s really the point of Terra Nova. There’s nostalgia, there’s science fiction, but most importantly, there’s bloody huge dinosaurs. With the recent re-release of Jurassic Park, and the neverending slew of dino-related shows that have dominated the airwaves since its 1993 debut, this is clearly still very marketable. What better then, than to have a safely formulaic sci fi drama in which you can have guns, jeeps, timey-wimey complexity and dinosaurs? Oh wait, that’s Primeval.

Terra Nova is presumably far more expensive than Primeval, but the CG dinos on display here are of very varying quality. The first we see are (exactly as in Jurassic Park) a herd of brachiosaurs, as little Zoe feeds them over the fence of the settler’s vast compound. And yes, they’re as unconvincing as the ones in Jurassic Park, where they were one of the worse effects. Later, we see some jeeps being chased by carnosaurs which blend into the rest of the picture less than convincingly. Somewhat better are the ‘slashers’ which besiege the rebellious teens of the settlement in a jeep in the second half of the story; this is because, wisely, they’re only partially shown in the darkness.

So it’s fifty-fifty on how good the dinosaurs are, already a bad sign in a show which has them as its raison d’etre. Unfortunately, the ‘thriller’ aspect of the plot is as formulaic as the family that form its main characters. There’s a dissident group of earlier settlers, the ‘Sixers’ (from the sixth group sent back in time), who control the local mineral supplies and are in a Cold War situation with the main camp. Why their controlling the minerals should be a problem is less than clear, as stuff seems to be getting sent back from the future all the time. But apparently it is a problem, and there’s more out there – camp commandant Nathaniel Taylor has a Big Secret. His son has been missing for years, but he seems curiously unconcerned. Could he have anything to do with the rather incongruous geometric graphs and equations seemingly scratched into the rock of the local waterfall some years ago? What could they mean? And have the Sixers been deliberately sent back to cause trouble by persons unknown in the 22nd century?

Unfortunately, with characters and writing this formulaic, it’s hard to care. Predictably, within hours of arriving at the settlement, rebellious Josh has sneaked off to the world outside the fence with the local teens and gotten into trouble. Dad Jim has saved the life of Colonel Taylor from a Sixer and been hired as a cop, and shy daughter Zoe has already pulled a hunky young army type who popped round to see if she was ok. And of course, there’s plenty of learning about how great families are, as Jim builds bridges with Zoe after his two year absence and struggles to bond with Josh as his daddy issues cause him to rebel, while Josh realises that, hey, his dad and him aren’t so different after all.

Struggling with the nausea this all induced, I still found time to wonder about the temporal and causal implications of the concept overall. If our heroes succeed in making a new world in the past, won’t that mean that their future has never existed, and that therefore they themselves will never have been born to come back in the first place? Jon Pertwee would have just muttered something about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, but here we’re told that, by a convoluted bit of reasoning, the settlers trip to the past has caused them to found an entirely new, separate timeline. Somehow they still must have links to our own though – otherwise how would anyone in the 22nd century know where the not-Stargate led to? This is glossed over, but since the narrative itself was so staggeringly predictable, it was this kind of thing that occupied my mind as I watched.

I must say, with the concepts and people involved, I didn’t have high hopes for Terra Nova. In the past, this has on occasion led to me being pleasantly surprised when my low expectations were surpassed. Here, though, I had the far worse sensation that this was even more bland and unoriginal than I expected. It’s saying something to comment that the similarly themed Primeval is, by dint of its own low standards and lack of pretension, far more fun for far less money. I’ll give Terra Nova a couple more episodes to see if things liven up, but I suspect that if I want to see this concept in the future, I’ll just watch Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 3

“All over the world, men are lying to women to get them into bed. Don’t overthink it.”

Life must go on, even in Section D of MI5. So it was this week, that after a couple of minutes mourning for the murdered Tariq, it was back to business as usual when a random sweep of airport baggage trolleys with a Geiger counter revealed trace amounts of radiation. Someone, it seemed, wanted to make a dirty bomb, and had brought some nasty radioactive stuff into the general vicinity of London.

Ever the professional, Harry decided that this was probably rather more urgent than the investigation into the death of their colleague (“Our friend,” as he touchingly referred to Tariq). So once again, the heroes that defend our realm with a team of about five people put aside their personal feelings to concentrate on the task at hand. Fortunately, Ruth was as efficient as ever in scanning the CCTV and finding the suspect within minutes, thereby saving the viewer from having to watch all that tedious investigation stuff that’s so much less exciting than surveillance, undercover work and shooting things.

Called upon to go undercover, in a plot I’m sure I’ve seen the show do before, was new action man Dimitri – deep undercover of the target’s sister’s bedclothes, as it turned out. Since the demise of Lucas North, Dimitri is obviously being shaped into the new central hero figure the show’s always had. When Spooks began, this figure, in the shape of Matthew MacFadyen’s Tom Quinn, was the central character of the show; later it became more of an ensemble piece, as the writers realised the rest of Section D was at least as interesting, if not more so, than Tom was. Nevertheless, there’s always been a central figure who does the James Bond stuff. Probably the most memorable and long-running was Rupert Penry-Jones as Adam Carter, though Richard Armitage was broodingly charismatic as the ever more improbable Lucas North.

Now, it seems, the task has fallen to the monumental talent that is Max Brown, and this was really the first episode where the handsome if wooden ex-Hollyoaks star was thrust into the limelight. Stirred from his usual role of defusing bombs or turning up with a gun at the last minute, Dimitri was required to get close to the target’s sister by means of internet dating – a rather sadder way to pick up women than James Bond usually needs. Still, Dimitri was clearly the obvious choice – he now seems to be one of only two field agents the Grid has, and since the other one is Erin, he was the one most likely to tempt a heterosexual woman. They could have tried Calum I suppose, but his social skills would probably have resulted in him leaving the first date alone and covered in red wine.

Dimitri was uncomfortable at the thought of having to go in so deep that he’d need a condom; but Erin effectively told him to belt up, and so Natalie Grier – sister of notorious anarchist Johnny Grier – was soon swayed by his charms and took him into her bed. Then, inevitably, her anarchist brother turned up and hit him. After making a show of being somewhat put out that must have taxed his acting talents to the max, Dimitri managed to convince Johnny that he was in fact an estate agent. Since Max Brown would be rather more believable as an estate agent than as a super spy, Johnny seemed taken in, and the op was on. Cue much trailing in cars, long distance photography, and hovering drones from which Ruth worked her usual magic of identifying the suspect.

While this plot was all perfectly well-executed – with the usual tense split-screen sequences as the search team rushed to finish their job while the suspect headed ever closer to home – I have to say there was a real feeling of having been here before. Johnny’s plan, it turned out after much twisty-turniness, was to irradiate the nasty CEO of a financial speculation company, who’d made a killing in yen after the recent Japanese earthquake. Harry and Erin made no secret of their distaste for this, but the CEO was more than happy to forget the insult when Dimitri turned up in the nick of time to try and talk Johnny down from breaking open a strangely fragile glass tube containing radium 226.

Johnny, it turned out, had cancer, and wanted to make a last grand anti-capitalist gesture. Dimitri, in the standard plot trope of all stories about undercover agents, had come to like him and understand his argument; but he’s a Security Professional who knows about The Harsh Realities of the Job, and he can’t let Johnny do it. “It’s not worth it,” he emotes, Max Brown’s acting muscles working overtime in an attempt to convey inner turmoil, “nobody’s watching any more.” But of course, Dimitri’s the one who’s watching now, and he’s come to care about Johnny – at least I think that’s what Max Brown’s face was trying to show. So Johnny pours the radium all over himself, and Max is called on portray angst and guilt on his handsome but immobile face as he tries to live with the consequences of having deceived a woman into thinking he loved her. Fortunately for him, Erin has drafted “the best Dear John letter ever written… the one I’d want to receive if someone was breaking up with me”. So that’s all right then.

As I said, this was all done competently enough, but it had the feel of very, very familiar ground as far as Spooks is concerned. What with this and last week’s mostly uninspiring stolen laptop plot, it may be a good thing, if a little sad, that the show’s finally coming to an end. Nobody likes watching a once-great show retreading old ground in an overextended lifespan – that’s what made The X Files often painful to watch during its last few seasons. If Spooks really has run out of ideas, it’s best that it goes out while still on a modest high.

The modest high – and it may get better than that – is this year’s Big Plot about detente with the Russians, Harry’s old flame/asset Elena Gavrik, and the seemingly duplicitous CIA. While shoved very much to the back burner this week, the Big Plot is miles more interesting than the overfamiliar runarounds taking up the bulk of the last two episodes. Thus, this week, Harry’s women got to have a tete-a-tete, as Ruth was sent in to retrieve the mysterious fake communiques from Elena. In keeping with the general attempt to mine every Cold War cliche in the book, they met at an art gallery, where their words seemed to echo rather more loudly round the room than would be entirely advisable for a secret meeting.

It was more than an exchange of intelligence though; Elena has twigged about Ruth and Harry. “I saw the way you looked at him at the reception… you love him, don’t you?” Ruth did that nonplussed look that Nicola Walker is so good at; a sort of very British mild discomfiture at the thought of openly discussing emotion: “I don’t know how to answer that.” But Elena knows Harry as well as Ruth, and has words of advice for her: “You can never expect the full confidence of a man like Harry Pearce. He can’t even give that to himself.”

Again, we’re in the fun territory of writing that vaguely recalls bits of John le Carre (whose opinion of this show is “crap”, incidentally). But the half-recalled Cold War tropes are a bit of fun nostalgia, enlivening the twisty plot about Harry’s past. Later, he meets up with his unsuspecting son Sasha, to let him know the results of their investigation, and Sasha is curious as to why Harry came himself. Cue a masterly angst-ridden pause from Peter Firth as Harry eventually blurted sadly, “no reason”. With his repressed emotion every bit a match for Ruth’s, it’s clear these two were made for each other.

And Ruth was getting flirted with herself this week, from a very unexpected quarter. Shifty Home Secretary Towers (the mighty Simon Russell Beale) invited her to dinner! He wants to promote her, for reasons that are unclear and very probably highly suspicious. His excuse is that he hates to see “wasted potential” – but you can’t help thinking he wants to split up the highly effective, romantically charged team of Harry and Ruth. But to what end, I wonder? Still, the whole thing served to get Ruth to express – cryptically, of course – the doubts she’s been having about Harry: “I’m sick of secrets. You never really get to know people. It just ends up with everybody feeling alone.”

Meanwhile, a contrite Calum is getting inevitably more likeable as he pursues a quiet investigation into Tariq’s death. He’s managed to retrieve the CCTV footage that Tariq was killed for having seen, and found that the courier for the stolen laptop was “from a little outfit called the Central Intelligence Agency”. What with the fake communiques to Elena containing info known only to Harry, Elena, and CIA honcho Jim Coaver, it’s clear that the CIA are behind it all. But this is Spooks, and the season’s only halfway through; expect this to be a total red herring. Mind you, the Big Plot will lose points with me if it turns out to be yet another shadowy international conspiracy bent on changing the global balance of power – Spooks has already had at least three of those, and you wonder how they managed to work their long term shady plans without ever noticing each other.

So, yet again this week, we had a very standard Spooks runaround that, while exciting enough, was nothing we hadn’t seen before. The bits involving the Big Plot were far more interesting, and it’s notable that, despite being a fairly small part of the episode, I’ve spent far more time dwelling on those than the overly familiar main plot. Last week at least had the shock death of Tariq to lift it a bit higher than being routine, but this week we only had the character moments of Harry, Ruth, Elena and Sasha. Here’s hoping for something a bit less familiar next week…

Doctor Who: Series 6, Episode 13–The Wedding of River Song

“You’ve decided the universe would be better off without you… the universe didn’t agree.”

“…they were all wearing eyepatches!” Right, got that out of the way. So, this was the big one, the one that had to wrap up the oh-so-confusing story arc that’s divided fandom and caused newspapers to write articles with titles like “Has Doctor Who got too complicated?” And did it manage to tie up all those loose ends successfully? Well, actually yes, with yet more hints of a bigger storyline to come that surely must lead up to the 2013 50th anniversary of the show.

As usual with Steven Moffat, The Wedding of River Song was bursting with imaginative ideas almost thrown randomly into the mix, and hinged on some pretty sophisticated sci-fi and philosophical concepts. This was, actually, more satisfying as a plot resolution than I expected Mr Moffat to manage. And yet, for all that, I found it curiously lacking in… something. I can’t really pin down what, though my first thought was ‘feeling’. Yes, it resolved this season’s aspect of what it now clearly a longer overall plot. But while I’ve enjoyed the puzzle box plotting so beloved of Mr Moffat, his Rubik’s Cube plot has been so cerebral this year that it satisfies without actually stirring the emotions. I used to complain that Russell T Davies’ plot conclusions were all feeling at the expense of logic; this time, despite a fine balance in last year’s The Big Bang, the season finale seems to be quite the opposite. It’s logical, it makes sense, it answers the questions (well, the ones for this year anyway) – and yet it left me curiously unmoved. It’s as though Moffat’s having such a fine time showing how he solved the puzzle, he’s forgotten we’re supposed to like and be emotionally affected by the characters who form its component parts.

That’s not to say I hated this, mind. It perhaps had too much to pack in for a one episode story, and it certainly would have been totally inaccessible to anyone who hadn’t watched the series overall. But what we saw rattled along quite excitingly, pulling together not just plot points but themes that have dominated the year.

The main theme, of course, was the Doctor’s increasing guilt and self-loathing, and the story showed us how, over the course of this season, he’s managed to convince himself that he does more harm than good. And that, ultimately, the universe would be a better place without him. His weary acceptance of his own oncoming death, which Matt Smith brought across so well last week, was very much to the fore here. One of the key factors about the Eleventh Doctor, as I mentioned a while ago, is his fallibility; and it fits that, in thinking this, he’s actually wrong. If the episode can be said to have had an emotional climax, it was when River opened his eyes to that, with the universe eager to come to his aid – “all you had to do was ask”.

And of course, how the Doctor gets out of that death has been the biggest question of the year. Steven Moffat stated as the year began that “one of the main characters will definitely die in the season opener”. It was audacious that it should be the Doctor himself; still more audacious to state bluntly that it was a real death that couldn’t be got out of, a point hammered home by this episode’s insistence that the Doctor’s death was one of those fixed points in time that simply cannot be changed. But this is Steven Moffat, and he’s getting good at misdirecting his audience in advance. The Doctor’s Rule One – the Doctor lies – is almost certainly the mantra of its showrunner these days.

He may perhaps have overloaded the series with red herrings this year, conscious of the fact that fans would be analysing every little detail. What was the business about Rory talking about his time in the TARDIS in the past tense in The God Complex? Why so many episodes that centred on father/son relationships? These things may pay off later, as the longer arc is gradually revealed; but it’s probably not a bad idea to have each season function as one complete story within that arc. Year one was all about the Crack and the Pandorica (and we still haven’t had a satisfactory explanation of why the TARDIS exploded); this year has been all about the Silence, River Song, and her erratically unfolding life story. These aspects meshed together logically enough as a resolution to how the Doctor’s death could be simultaneously guaranteed and averted.

First though, we had to see how we got there. The episode had a clever, tricksy, non-linear narrative. Plunging us first of all into a visually imaginative world where steam trains roam the London skylines, cars float around under balloons, and Roman legionaries wait impatiently at traffic lights was deliberately disorienting. The further revelation that it was always 5.02pm on 22 April was another Sapphire and Steel like touch in a series that has been full of them this year.

It was also nice (if fan-pleasingly self-indulgent) to see the return of so many characters from the show’s past. Simon Callow popped up in a cameo as Charles Dickens, with a presumably post-modern reference to how good “this year’s Christmas Special” was going to be. Dr Mahlokeh the Silurian was back, as Roman Emperor Winston Churchill’s personal physician. And Churchill himself had rather more than the cameo part that those were; although ultimately, his appearance had nothing to do with the advancement of the plot. As he called for his soothsayer to explain “what’s gone wrong with time”, it was a surprise to absolutely no-one that the ragged figure his legionaries dragged in turned out to be none other than the Doctor – albeit with some of the most unconvincing stick-on facial hair I’ve ever seen. And I may have been imagining it, but was Matt Smith wearing a wig this week? His usual hairstyle was there, but somehow unconvincing, as though it was glued on…

That may or may not be a Moffat Big Clue (it probably isn’t), but we then got the preceding events filled in as one of those Star Wars style quests across multiple alien worlds Moffat seems so fond of. Here again, we got some really imaginative ideas tossed into the mix without any real exploration or development. As with A Good Man Goes to War, a lot of these might have been interesting enough to sustain an episode in themselves; the ‘live chess’ game with 4000 volts running through the pieces, the seedy bar the Doctor meets the Teselecta in (Mos Eisley spaceport?), the cavern of still-living, carnivorous heads lopped off by the headless monks. When I reviewed A Good Man Goes to War, I said that this was evidence of the abundance of interesting ideas Moffat has, and I still think that’s true; but churlish though it may be, I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s more the case that he has the ideas and doesn’t really know what to do with them beyond making glancing references.

Whether or not that’s the case, it made for a colourful snapshot of a complicated galaxy (though whether the vignettes all took place in the same time zone was unclear). And the pit of skulls devouring an almost unrecognisable Mark Gatiss as Gantok was one of a number of memorable scary images this week. Not to mention another Moffat trope, the cameo inclusion of a big bad just to move the plot along – in this case a rather muted coloured New Dalek. I wonder whether its grey look was a result of damage or whether the production team have had second thoughts about their new Day Glo look? It’s also worth noting that the Dalek Amy drew as part of her remembrance of the Doctor was definitely an old style one…

Of course, this was all to lead us to the point where we came in – the death of the Doctor at Lake Silencio, in what, as Richard says over at the Millennium Dome blog, must be the most ridiculously convoluted assassination plot ever. And that was where it all changed, as River declared (contrary to what we’d previously been led to believe) that fixed points can be changed. Whoosh, bang, whiteout, and there we were back at the episode’s start, with all of history happening simultaneously.

That’s a neat concept I’ve seen played out in various comic strips over the years (notably 2000AD and, erm, Doctor Who Monthly). I’m not sure it actually makes any sense if you stop and think about it, but it mined a rich seam of weirdness as we saw Buckingham Palace adorned with ‘SPQR’ banners and heard Winston Churchill talking about downloads.

At that point it started to flow in a bit more of a linear way, and became slightly easier to follow. The return of the Silence was well-handled,with the creepy revelation that Winston and the Doctor have been seeing and forgetting them all through their conversation; though given that the Edvard Munch-alikes still seem to be in charge, it seems that, contrary to what we’ve been told, they are a species rather more than they’re a religion. Certainly their human lackeys – in this case Frances Barber as the memorably hubristic Madam Kovarian – seem quite disposable to them.

It all led to the big emotional scene at the top of the pyramid, in which River finally, actually, married the Doctor. This was an emotional scene, but it somehow lacked the punch of previous Big Teary bits in the Finale – notably the Doctor’s sacrificing of himself at the end of last year’s The Big Bang. And in fact, the plot here was quite similar to that episode too; the Doctor has to die, but how can he get out of it?

As it happened, I thought the way he got out of it this time was considerably less imaginative than having Amy dream him back into being. With at least one duplicate Doctor (from The Rebel Flesh) and one shape shifting time travelling robot having been seen this year, it seemed so obvious that it would be one of those substituting for the real Doctor that I assumed it would be another red herring. But no; with the Teselecta robot and its crew featuring so heavily in the ‘Previously on…’ sequence, it seemed a clincher from that point that they’d be taking it on. When the Doctor actually bumped into the Teselecta at the seedy space bar, that felt like it pretty much confirmed it. So when the script revealed the big switch, in that actually rather nice scene with a River out of time visiting Amy, it actually felt like a bit of an anticlimax. It also seems rather lucky that the Teselecta is capable of doing such a convincing job of imitating the regeneration process…

Of course, the other main plot point driving this year has been Amy’s pregnancy, and the not entirely unexpected reveal that River was her daughter. I – and a number of others – have found it slightly unbelievable that, since she discovered the truth about where baby Melody had gone, she and Rory seemed so unaffected by the loss of her opportunity to actually bring her up. Yes, it’s sort of a resolution that she actually grew up alongside her, and that, as River, Amy knows she’s going to turn out all right. And yet, at the same time, it never seemed believable that any parent would so easily accept that she would never get to bring her child up in a normal family environment.

I’d been hoping this uncharacteristic behaviour would pay off later (as some sort of mind control, perhaps), and here it did, but in a rather half hearted way. OK, you could say that Amy cold-bloodedly murdering Madam Kovarian for revenge over her lost baby is actually quite extreme; but as River comments later, it happened in an aborted alternate timeline – even if Amy is still torturing herself with guilt over it. It seemed to come rather out of nowhere too; this is the first time since she lost Melody to Madam Kovarian that Amy has even seemed that upset about it. For that matter, she’s had Madam Kovarian locked up for a while in the alternate reality and hasn’t hurt her till this point. Still, while I generally didn’t find it that satisfying, this was at least an acknowledgement that a real, breathing mum would actually be pretty upset over this turn of events.

Alternate Rory was pretty cool though, with his black ops uniform, gun and eyepatch. He got to be a hero again this week, as he held off the Silence despite being in agony. The fact that the Silent who spoke to him knew that he dies and comes back all the time was amusing, but did unfortunately underline another Moffat trope that many have come to dislike – the fact that, in Doctor Who these days, death is no real threat as anyone who dies will be back in some contrived way. This point was even further underlined by the return of the now bodiless Dorium Maldovar, who was mainly there to explain the plot.

And the plot’s not over, it seems (not that I really expected it to be, after last year’s finale). We now know that the Silence want the Doctor dead because, at some point in the future at a place called the Field of Trenzillor, he will answer a question they don’t want answered. We were teased by this all the way through the episode, as Maldovar told the Doctor fairly early on offscreen, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that the question (in a show that’s ever more concerned with dissecting the identity of its title character) was “Doctor who?” To underline the point, Maldovar’s head shouted it ever louder as the screen faded to black on an enigmatic close-up of Matt Smith. Doctor who indeed? A query the show’s never fully answered, with hints dropped every time we learn something about him that there’s some other, bigger revelation to come. If his identity is enough for a species/religious order to want him dead because it threatens them, it’s obviously a pretty big deal – and again, I’m wondering whether all this tantalising is leading up to a big revelation for the 50th anniversary.

All those returning characters felt, like Journey’s End, a bit self-indulgent, so if they do another big reunion for an anniversary special, it will already seem like a tiresome gimmick. But it was nice to see Amy and Rory again; the fact that they were in an alternate reality is a neat way of not invalidating the impact of their departure a couple of weeks ago. Plus, very much in keeping with the style of new Who, that penultimate scene in their garden was pretty much confirmation that they’re not gone for good. Whether they’re back as regulars next year I’m not sure (though there are enough unanswered questions about them that I feel they should be). But I’m sure we’ll be seeing them again at some point.

Unlike, sadly, Nicholas Courtney. It was a lovely decision of Steven Moffat to have Nick’s memorial within the show itself, rather than as a line in the credits. Admittedly, the scene felt tacked on, but if anyone deserves to have a scene tacked on to an episode, Nicholas Courtney is the one. Matt Smith did a nicely subtle job of portraying grief, something he seems very good at this year. It felt right that this often repressed Doctor should react in such an admirably stiff upper lip to hearing of the death of his longest standing friend. Of course, as a time traveller, he could pop back and visit the Brigadier whenever he liked, but that wasn’t really the point. This was really a memorial to the man who played him, but it was fitting that the character too got a send off. Whether it was intentional or a mere coincidence for it to have happened in a story so full of eyepatches we may never know..

All in all then, a conclusion to a controversially complex series that tied up the loose ends well enough while leaving us with hints of more to come, yet was for me a bit unsatisfying. It satisfied my head, but not my heart. Last year’s finale got this balance just right, for me anyway, but this year’s felt like it had tipped just too far towards the cerebral, despite the glorious visual invention on display. In a final analysis, I didn’t hate the Big Arc as so many others did, but this year neither was I that thrilled by it. I’ve actually found the standalone episodes more rewarding generally, with the arc stories (particularly A Good Man Goes to War and Let’s Kill Hitler) seeming like witty pyrotechnic displays that were full of complexity but somehow lacked substance. While I’d hoped for more, The Wedding of River Song was enjoyable enough, but I hope Mr Moffat pulls out a few more stops next time.