Reviews – Page 46 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

True Blood: Season 5, Episode 2–Authority Always Wins

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 2 YET.

“..as the beetle nourishes the lark, so shall human nourish vampire.”

As it’s still only episode 2, the ingredients of the torrid Louisiana gumbo that is True Blood season 5 are still stirring restlessly in the pot without any clear direction. Having set out the season’s stall in last week’s rather frenetic premiere, this week’s was allowed to simmer slowly as the various plots marinaded in their juices. The result was an episode that felt a little deeper than last week’s even if it moved more slowly, but still managed to address the mass of convoluted plots we’d already established.

First and foremost was resolving last week’s cliffhanger, as the enraged, bestial vampire-Tara burst from the ground lunging instantly for Sookie’s throat. This was not entirely unexpected. We’ve already seen that a newborn vampire always wakes hungry, and is totally lacking in self-control, and this case had the added complication, as Pam pointed out last week, that Tara’s gunshot wound had removed a sizeable chunk of her head. Even with vampire healing powers, would she be too far gone to even remember who she was?

The script played around with us there, as every time the ep returned to the increasingly desperate Sookie and Lafayette, Tara was still unspeaking and feral. Pam was no help; as far as she was concerned, she’d held up her end of the bargain turning Tara in the first place. “But you’re her maker,” pleaded Sookie, to be met with the expected sardonic shrug and acid tongue from Pam: “and I made her. I’ve done my part.”

Pam’s one of my favourite characters, with her dry bitchiness and reliably sharp tongue. I was glad that Kristin Bauer got promoted to the main cast a couple of seasons ago, but Pam’s still not been given any real history beyond occasional hints. We know Eric’s her maker, and she’s unswervingly devoted to him (in one of her rare examples of actual emotion that isn’t bitchiness).

But it looks like we’re going to learn a bit more this year, as this week showed a few flashbacks to Pam’s pre-vampire life in 1905 San Francisco, as a brothel madam plagued by a serial killer. Said serial killer was swiftly dispatched by Eric as soon as he got his hands on Pam (and didn’t Alexander Skarsgard look great in top hat and tails?), after which Eric high speed vamped it out of there with Pam looking lustfully after her mysterious saviour. The flashbacks didn’t go as far as showing her being turned, so I’m betting we’ll be seeing more of these as the season progresses.

Pam only turned Tara to gain Sookie’s help in finding the absent Eric; quite apart from her unrequited love, they’ve got a bar to run. But Eric and Bill were ‘safely’ in the arms of the Authority, and it was this plotline that the episode seemed to spend the most time on. It may be that this will become the main plotline for the season; but it’s still too early to really tell, on past experience.

Authority HQ was nicely realised as a grandiose (underground) office facility, complete with modern-style reception facilities and holding cells that looked suspiciously like redressed sets from last year, in which identical cells were to be found under Bill Compton’s house. Still, I suppose there’s probably a standard design for cells that will hold incredibly strong, near invulnerable supernatural creatures, so I can’t hold the similarity too much against the show.

What the cells also have are nifty vamp torture devices, in the form of UV lights in the roof, which explains the horrific burn scars on Bill, Eric and Nora’s cellmate, a wretched vamp with an insatiable desire to eat babies. In fact, the Authority seem to be dab hands at torturing other vampires, though I guess they’ve had plenty of centuries to refine their methods. Bill and Eric discovered another of these as they were interrogated; IV lines that injected silver solution into their veins. This seemed a bit extreme – since vampires are basically allergic to silver, and can’t metabolise it, this seemed likely to actually kill them.

Still, internal logic is best ignored in a show like True Blood, so I got on with finding out what the Authority were so pissed about. Turns out to be quite a lot. Not only are they rather unhappy about their PR spokeswoman having been staked by one of their captives, they’re also none too keen that one of their own was helping said captives to escape. On top of that, they’re pretty fanatical that their attempts to integrate with human society should succeed, and worried that a fundamentalist sect determined to interpret the ‘Vampire Bible’ literally could derail the whole thing.

This was pretty much a mountain of exposition as Bill discussed this new aspect of vampire society with his deceptively genial inquisitor Dieter. But the script kept it lively, cutting from Bill’s interrogation to Eric’s, and revealing relevant info in a drip feed (while drip feeding silver into our harried heroes’ veins). This ‘Vampire Bible’ (that’s not going to go down well in more Christian viewing areas) predates both Old and New Testaments, and claims that God created the vampire in his own image, then provided humans as food. They even have their own Adam figure, and tellingly, it’s female – Lilith (in our own Bible, the name for a demon in Hebrew mythology).

The Authority seem convinced that Bill and/or Eric know something about the fundamentalists who want to screw up the whole ‘mainstreaming’ process. Which they don’t. Well, unless they do, and it’s going to be retconned in; this is the first we humble viewers have heard of this ‘Sanguinista’ cult.

The Authority are also rather pissed off at Bill and Eric’s general disobedience and untrustworthiness. This suggests an almost complete lack of self awareness, as the show has established that these are some of the defining traits of vampires - even Nan Flanagan was trying to recruit Bill and Eric to a revolution when they staked her. But still, you can see their point. Bill and Eric have defied orders from everyone at pretty much every turn, sometimes, very very stupidly.

The prime example of which was in not actually killing Russell Edgington – that’s bloody stupid by any measure. Have Bill and Eric never seen the show they’re in? Still, fortunately for them, it gave them a handy bargaining chip with the vengeful (and very angry) Authority council. Russell’s going to be coming for Bill and Eric; if the council want him stopped, they’d better keep their bait alive.

As I said, this was quite an infodump, so it was no wonder the episode had to focus on this plot strand particularly. It looks like religion – and religious sectarianism – may be shaping up to be one of the main themes this year. The script found time to show that from other angles too, as we found that the lovelorn Steve Newlin had ‘come out of the coffin’ to pretty much replace Nan Flanagan as vampire spokesperson on national TV. It’s a good strategy; what could reconcile religious vamp-haters better than a converted Christian?

Amusingly though, Steve may be out of the coffin but he’s certainly not out of the closet, at least as far as TV is concerned. Asked about his ‘significant other’, he referred to a ‘she’. The show may have been making a bit of a point here – middle America is starting to accept vampires, but gays are still a step too far in the True Blood universe!

That’s unfortunate for Steve, since he’s still absolutely fixated on the undoubted physical charms of the none-too-bright Jason Stackhouse. As he gatecrashed Jessica’s keg party and actually attempted to buy Jason from her, it became clear that once again, Steve’s going to be the more comic adversary this year.

With the focus this week mainly on the vamp-Tara and Authority plotlines, the other subplots got little more than a cursory glance, but each had its own little moment. Jason, still (disturbingly) the sharpest mind on the Bon Temps PD, was advising Sheriff Andy on his sex life, when his own came crashing back to haunt him. A teenage boy gave him an almighty thump because Jason’s wayward pecker had caused the boy’s parents to split up (“Is there any woman in this town you haven’t slept with?” asked the exasperated Andy). This caused Jason, ever the sensitive soul, to reflect on the damage he’d done, and try to mend fences with former best bud Hoyt. It was to no avail, but at least led to the comic moment of Hoyt’s dragon of a mom thanking Jason for splitting up her son and “that red-haired slut”.

Bon Temps’ other redhead, Arlene, was getting increasingly worried about Terry, who’s taken to seeing Rambo-style flashbacks of Iraq and making doomy pronouncements in his sleep: “We’re all gonna die. It’s coming for us.” This led to a chat with ex-platoon buddy Patrick, but Terry himself turned up before Patrick could spill the beans as to what it’s all about. But Terry himself did spill some beans – the whereabouts of their former comrade who might be setting those fires. Now what’s the betting that it’s actually Patrick who’s been doing that, and Terry’s just given him the location of his next victim? D’oh!

Elsewhere, there’s shenanigans with Marcus’ old werewolf pack. Alcide, defying wolf law, isn’t going to take over the pack. This is probably just as well, as they all seem to want to kill him. At least Sam’s off the hook, but he and Luna have to contend with Marcus’ mom wanting visitation rights for her grandchild, who given her mixed parentage, could just as easily be a werewolf or a shapeshifter. Comic cliffhanger number one came as Luna discovered which; bursting into her daughter’s bedroom, she found a cute little wolf pup in a nightdress. Awww…

OK, that’s hardly too worrying, but the other cliffhangers might be. After toying with us all episode, Tara finally revealed that her mind’s still there after all. Unfortunately. Because her best friend and her cousin have just turned her into the thing she hates most, and her first words to them are “I’ll never forgive you both”. To add injury to insult, she can’t even storm out of chez Stackhouse without being sprayed with liquid silver. I can’t see that helping her get over it.

Meanwhile, the camera panned across a pile of gruesomely dismembered bodies to finally show us Russell Edgington. He’s not looking too good; covered in nasty looking, chain-shaped scars from the silver used to restrain him, he can barely move. But somebody dug him up, and is plainly throwing victims at him – I wonder, could it be these Sanguinista cultists we’ve been hearing so much about?

Week two then, and the gumbo that is True Blood still simmers in search of this year’s true flavour. Traditionally, each season has started in a mess of mutifarious, overheated plotlines, before settling on one (or sometimes two, but no more) as the main ones on which to focus. Which ones these are are rarely clear so early in the season, and again, this year is no exception. But there’s still plenty to enjoy here, in the morass of simmering supernatural excesses. And I note with approval that Denis O’ Hare is in the opening credits – even if Russell isn’t the main Big Bad this year, it was his extraordinary performance that made the character so memorable, and I’m glad he’s back.

True Blood: Season 5, Episode 1–Turn! Turn! Turn!

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 1 YET.

“We are done with all this supernatural shit!”

Rejoice, for True Blood is back! Yes, I know there’s a glut of vampires infesting our TVs these days, but this overripe high camp gothic treat is one of the finest. I know many fans felt that its previous, fourth season had jumped the shark somewhat. The addition of ‘dark fairies’ felt like one supernatural creature too far in a show that already features vampires, werewolves, ghosts, witches, maenads, shapeshifters and werepanthers. And some felt that reincarnated witch Antonia and her possessee, failed modern witch Marnie, lacked the ‘bite’ of season three’s uber bad guy, deranged vampire king Russell Edgington.

But I enjoyed season four personally. It did take a while to get going – this show’s seasons usually do. But once it did, I thought it worked at what True Blood does best – massively overdramatic, debauched OTT tales of the supernatural, liberally drenched with gore and sex. This is a show that doesn’t know the meaning of the word restraint, and last year gave us some great storylines, including an amnesiac Eric Northman falling for Sookie, Lafayette killing his boyfriend while possessed, and of course Antonia/Marnie’s threat of a vampire Holocaust.

In its normal full throttle style, the show ended its fourth season with a veritable orgy of cliffhangers, and this premiere of season five has its work cut out in addressing them all. The result is an episode that entertains but never really thrills, satisfies rather than grabs you by the throat as some season premieres strive to do. But then, True Blood premieres are usually like that; stuffed so full of new plotlines, creatures and tensions that it takes several episodes for it to settle down into a coherent story. In that, this year’s season opener is no different.

It starts not just where we left off last time, but a little before, as we see again the climactic shooting of Sookie’s best friend Tara, this time with other perspectives thrown in. Bill and Eric are busy cleaning up the mess left behind by their assassination of vampire Authority PR queen Nan Flanagan; as Bill chats on the phone to his vampire ‘daughter’ Jessica, Eric is comically doing a hyper-fast Superman turn behind him, mopping up the blood and slime left from Nan’s long overdue demise. Both sense trouble over at Sookie’s, but since they’ve both just had their advances rebuffed, they do nothing about it. “Fuck Sookie,” is Eric’s growled comment; can we hear denial, boys and girls?

We also get to hear the shooting from Lafayette’s perspective. As Tara’s brother, and already wracked with guilt for having stabbed his boyfriend Jesus while possessed, Lafayette is not having a good time this year, and it’s only five minutes in. No surprise then that when Eric’s marvellously bitchy paramour Pam turns up looking for him, it’s a tearful Lafayette who begs her to turn Tara into a vampire rather than let her die.

Elsewhere, Jason Stackhouse had just opened the door to a foe from two seasons ago, anti-vampire fundamentalist minister Rev Steve Newlin – who’s turned into a vampire himself! Shapeshifter Sam had found himself surrounded by the vengeance-hungry werewolf pack of nasty old Marcus Bozeman, killed by the hunky Alcide Herveaux, whose trashy girlfriend Debbie had been the one to shoot Tara, while aiming for Sookie, then ended up shot herself – by Sookie. A mysterious army buddy of Terry Bellefleur had turned up after dire warnings from the ghost of season one’s serial killer Rene. The enigmatic vampire Authority have it in for Bill and Eric, hence their staking of Nan who’d been sent to deliver them to the true death. Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, somebody’s only gone and dug up the silver-restrained, concrete-encased Russell Edgington. Got all that?

As you can imagine, it’s a tall order to try and deal with so much convoluted, overheated supernatural soap in one episode and still set up new plotlines for the upcoming season, but this has a go. It mostly succeeds, but has its hands too full to truly grab you. And I always think it’s a bit of a warning sign when a show starts to trade in on its own past glories by bringing back fan favourites of yesteryear – counting Rene’s ghost from the season finale, that’s three major Big Bads from previous seasons hanging around Bon Temps now. Perhaps they’ll all have to share a lair.

And with all that going on, the episode still finds time to introduce a few new characters, who look like they’re going to be important. Bill and Eric blow their way out of the Authority car trunk, only to discover that the Authority representative (Lucy Griffiths, Maid Marian out of Robin Hood) is on their side. And she’s someone Eric knows well enough to fall straight into a passionate kiss – his sister! Don’t worry, it’s not shades of the disturbing relationship between Luke and Leia; she’s only his sister in the sense that both were turned by Godric. That’s all right then, Eric can get on with shagging her wildly in a cargo container. Which is fine by me, as any excuse for Alexander Skarsgard to get his clothes off is always good.

Ryan Kwanten too got naked – in fact he started out that way, peering nervously round his door at the grinning vampire-Steve. It was one of the funnier scenes as Steve glamoured his way in, then confessed to a tied-up Jason that he’d always loved him (surprising absolutely nobody). Jason, not usually the smartest cookie, actually dealt with that quite sensitively – he’s flattered, but… Unfortunately, the “just friends” gambit doesn’t usually work, particularly with a lovelorn Christian vampire who’s just come out of the closet. Lucky for Jason, he’s still getting it on with Jessica (much to Hoyt’s displeasure), and she turns up in the nick of time to fend off the less experienced vampire. Then disrobes to reveal some sexy undies to the (still naked) Jason. Yep, True Blood is still that kind of show.

Sookie, meanwhile, found herself with corpses to dispose of – Tara is duly buried to await the results of Pam’s vampirising, but Alcide’s girlfriend Debbie is still cluttering up the kitchen. You’d think the logical thing to do would be to let the cops deal with it – open and shut case of self defence, eh? But Sookie, ever honest, can’t help confessing that she killed Debbie not because she had to, but because she wanted to. Time to get out the shovels again then.

And there’s still the corpse of Lafayette’s boyfriend Jesus to deal with, last seen tied to a chair in Lafayette’s living room. But when they get there, his corpse (and the chair) have mysteriously vanished. Has he, like his namesake, risen again? In this show, I wouldn’t be at all surprised – death isn’t usually a bar to your character reappearing. It also means there’s no need to worry the police about that corpse either.

Which is lucky, because right now it seems like Jason Stackhouse is the brains of Bon Temps’ police department, which is saying something. Sheriff Andy Bellefleur, now over his V addiction, is discovered sleeping with witchy waitress Holly – by her two teenage sons armed with guns, no less. As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, he’s prone to corruption by the shifty local judge, who wants his son’s speeding ticket “forgotten about”. I’d be seriously worried if I ever had to depend on the Bon Temps police department for any actual law enforcement.

After an awkward visit with Sookie (in which she almost mentions killing his girlfriend but thinks better of it), Alcide was off to stop Sam taking the rap for killing werewolf pack leader Marcus. Basically, Sam and Alcide seem to be having a competition as to which can be the more noble and self-sacrificing. It helps that they’re both pretty easy on the eye; I wouldn’t normally go for one as buff as Alcide’s Joe Manganiello, but he’s got something. And Sam’s always been hot, in a kind of unreconstructed, gentleman cowboy way.

There’s weird stuff going on at the house of Terry Bellefleur and Arlene (well, when isn’t there?) For reasons, presumably, of loyalty to a fellow marine, Terry’s let creepy fellow Iraq vet Patrick stay as a house guest. But Patrick seems oddly interested in talk of their recent fire, having noticed that several of their old platoon buddies have died in similar fires.

Terry, the only man who can make post traumatic stress disorder genuinely funny, tries to tell him that this fire was nothing to worry about – it was just caused by a ghost who turned out to be ok after all when she was listened to. Even so, it looks like someone’s offing members of Terry and Patrick’s old unit. Could one of them be next? Could one of them (well, Patrick, probably) actually be behind it? There’s at least one new plotline to be going on with…

There’s shenanigans aplenty with Marcus’ old pack too – looks like Alcide might end up pack leader by default. Which doesn’t please Marcus’ mother, who promptly turns into a wolf and starts eating her dead son’s intestines. Like I say, that kind of show. Bill and Eric seem not to have escaped the Authority after all (luckily for Eric, who would have struggled with the alias ‘Ike Applebaum’). And lastly, where is Russell Edgington? Everyone’s pretty worried by his disappearance, but he’s nowhere to be seen – yet. It looks like he’s being kept behind closed doors by an unidentified somebody, and occasionally fed (cue blood flying all over a door window).

Plenty to chew on then – in fact, maybe more than you can chew if you were lumbered with writing the script for this and trying to cram all that in. Still, it was entertaining enough, in its usual madly over the top way, and filled with the requisite amounts of eye candy (whichever gender you like), gore and overheated Gothic Southern dialogue. I must admit, I’m a little trepidatious about the show repeating itself if Russell is again going to be the Big Bad; it feels like when Being Human brought back similar king vampire Herrick after a season’s absence. But Being Human cleverly subverted it by having him acting (initially) like a new ‘man’. With what seems to be a feral Russell in the thrall of someone as yet unknown, he may not be this year’s Big Bad after all. Like I say, True Blood has always started in a fever of twisting storylines, but usually comes into focus by about episode three or four. On the (still fun) evidence we had here, it’s business as usual.

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 13–The Phantom

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 13 YET.

“It’s a great sin to take advantage of hopeless people.”

After the high drama of recent episodes – Joan’s prostitution, Peggy’s departure, Lane’s suicide – the finale to Mad Men’s fifth season felt somewhat more low key. It was a chance for the characters to take stock of where they’d been left by the tumultuous events of the year, both in their business and personal lives. It was notable that, this year more than any, there was no major historical event against which to juxtapose the characters, a sign perhaps that the drama itself is now more important than its context.

One of the things the show has often dealt with is the consequences of its characters’ actions, and this finale seemed to take most of its time in dealing with those. Mad Men’s plotlines never have what you could call conclusions, not really, but there were capstones – and consequences – to many of the subplots laid out this year.

Lane’s suicide has obviously affected everyone at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce very deeply (apart from anything else, they’re presumably going to have to rename the company). Yet, in keeping with the show’s usual dramatic subtlety, it was quite some way into the episode before anyone explicitly mentioned the matter. Initially, we got some sideways references to it: Lane’s empty chair at the partners’ meeting, Harry, Bert, and apparently others being less than keen to move into the office where this unspeakable event had happened.

Don seemed to be keeping it together, but from the very start his guilt seemed to be manifesting itself; initially as a troublesome toothache which he refused to see a dentist about, then increasingly with visions of his dead brother Adam. As noted by many Lane’s suicide (probably intentionally) mirrored Adam’s perfectly. Both hanged themselves after having been rejected by Don, and obviously Don (and the screenwriter) is acutely aware of the similarity.

In moral terms, Don’s treatment of Lane is far more defensible than his treatment of his brother, who he rejected to keep his former life as Dick Whitman a secret. As a partner in the agency who’d been found to be embezzling it and forging the accounts, Lane was clearly in an untenable positions, and Don at least did him the courtesy of allowing him to resign while keeping the embezzlement confidential (though this may have had more to do with Don worrying that a police investigation would turn up his own ongoing identity theft). Nonetheless, Don should have little to feel guilty about concerning Lane.

But that’s not how it works when somebody you’re close to kills himself, and the visions of Don’s brother may have more to do with reminding us that he really should feel responsible in that case. It’s a mark of the show’s attention to detail that they were able to hire Jay Paulson to return as Adam after having dispatched the character in the first season. He’s a distinctive enough actor for me to have recognised him immediately as the ‘phantom’ of the title when Don started seeing him out of the corner of his eye, tentatively asking, “Adam?”

These two manifestations of Don’s present and ongoing guilt finally came together as Don relented and wen to the dentist to see about his toothache. Knowledge of the show’s style meant that, as Don went under the gas and closed his eyes, then opened them again, I realised instantly that we were into one of the show’s ‘dream’ sequences. So it proved as Adam turned up, not to berate Don but offer a sad smile and another parallel to Lane: “I lost my job. Because I’m dead.” An unpleasant purple weal around his neck was proof enough of this, and Don pleaded, “Don’t go”. To which Adam’s response – “Don’t worry, I’ll hang around. Get it?” indicates that we’ll likely be seeing more of Don’s increasing burden of guilt when the show returns.

It doesn’t help that Lane’s death, along with a resurgence in business from Mohawk Airlines, has done the company pretty well financially. His life insurance payout is massive, and SCDP are the beneficiaries – shades of Death of a Salesman, which were further emphasised when Don insisted on paying $50,000 of the settlement to Lane’s widow.

The scene of Don visiting Mrs Pryce, and awkwardly trying to offer condolences only to be rejected coldly, was one of those supremely uncomfortable scenes Mad Men does so well. Embeth Davidtz as Rebecca Pryce has had almost nothing to do, acting wise, beyond a blithe ignorance of her husband’s misdeeds; now finally, she got a chance to show her acting mettle. As the only other thing I’ve ever seen her in was the 1993 Evil Dead sequel Army of Darkness, I was pleasantly surprised by how good she was here. Keeping the traditional British restraint about grief, she coldly told Don, “It was wrong of you to fill a man like that with ambition” – probably the most succinct analysis of Lane’s downfall you could get. And she outright told Don that she knew this to be just an attempt to salve his own conscience, and that as far as she was concerned, it did nothing to alleviate his guilt. Ouch.

As this is Mad Men, and everyone has to be having a horrible time, Pete Campbell was doing pretty badly too. Pete’s one of those characters that, while impossible to like, I still can’t help feeling sorry for; as mentioned several weeks ago, absolutely nothing works out for him. His tragedy is that, like Don, he seems to have everything he should want, but like Don, it’s never enough. It’s ironic that this is the one way in which Pete truly is similar to his ‘hero’ Don.

This week, we got a resolution – of sorts – to his attempts to have a passionate affair a la Don, with fellow commuter’s wife Beth. After seeing Beth on the train, he was powerless to resist her invitation for a meaningless shag in the same hotel where she’d stood him up. Then she revealed that this would be the last time it would happen – she was off to have her depression treated (not for the first time) with electro convulsive therapy, and experience had taught her that she would likely not even remember him afterward.

This led to a rather heartbreaking scene as Pete blagged his way in to visit her at the hospital, only to discover that she’d already had the ECT and (apparently) really had forgotten who he was. Cue a long and surprisingly moving speech from Pete as he detailed the travails of the ‘friend’ he told Beth he was there to visit – actually, of course, a summation of his own emptiness and lack of fulfilment. It was delivered brilliantly by Vincent Kartheiser, who constantly manages – for me, anyway – to keep Pete straddling the line between loathsome and sympathetic.

At least one thing seemed to work out for him, though. Ending up in a fistfight on the commuter train with Beth’s husband Howard, he unwisely baited the no-nonsense conductor who broke up the fight, receiving a black eye for his trouble. Turning up battered at home led wife Trudy (Community’s Alison Brie, who we don’t see nearly enough of) to concede that his desire to rent an apartment back in Manhattan was probably a good idea. But what’s the betting that it’s not going to make him any happier?

At least we got a welcome return for Peggy Olson. I wouldn’t expect her to have left the show for good; after all, the very first episode began with her first day at the agency, and she’s been a crucial character since. Here, we saw that life at Cutler Gleason and Chaough may not be much better for her. Ted Chaough dragooned her into taking up smoking so she can work on a prospective Philip Morris account, and it’s no surprise that she followed her old boss’s example once again when times are hard – she went to the movies.

Where, as chance would have it, she met Don himself, also taking refuge from his troubles as he recovered from his tooth extraction (it must have been terrifying for him when the dentist told him he couldn’t smoke for 24 hours). Their scene together was touching; despite Peggy having only left a couple of weeks ago, they hugged like old friends who hadn’t seen each other for ages. The real chemistry between Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss was again in evidence as both feigned happiness, avoiding the subject of their current worries. At least Don’s regret over her departure was expressed; he seemed bitter and sad but proud when he told her, “that’s what happens when you help someone. They succeed and move on.” I doubt we’ve seen the last of Peggy (she was highlighted significantly in the closing montage); but I wonder where she’ll be when the show returns. Back at SCDP, or turning into a capable rival for Don elsewhere?

Thankfully, the often-too-perfect Megan was getting a serious dose of her husband’s usual sense of angst and futility. Her acting career is noticeably failing to take off (and her mother is none too sympathetic), and like Don, she took refuge in brooding and getting drunk. Jessica Pare is a perfectly capable actress, but I can certainly understand many people’s objection that Megan has little depth as a character beyond acting as a foil for Don’s insecurities. Here, finally, that mask of wholesomeness was nicely cracked.

After one of her friends begged her for an in with Don to be cast in a new SCDP commercial, Megan basically stabbed her in the back by trying to get the gig herself. Don was initially reluctant but eventually conceded, and in one of the episode’s last scenes, we saw that Megan had got the job. Terrific, perhaps, but a total abandonment of her earlier principled stance that she wanted to succeed on her own merit. She may be finally getting work, but it’s only because of her husband rather than her ability, and she betrayed a close friend to do so. Welcome properly to the world of Mad Men characters, Megan. (And that’s before you even consider that her mother is yet again entwined in the ‘understanding’ arms of Roger Sterling!)

The ep – and the season – concluded with one of its trademark musical montages, this time set to Nancy Sinatra’s hit of that year, ‘You Only Live Twice’. As usual – a highly appropriate choice – Don manages to both recall and subvert the archetype of James Bond as he walks away from Megan’s film set into the darkness. Hanging out at a bar, he was approached by, yet again, a shyly attractive young lady. And her friend. And his unspoken answer to their question – “Are you alone?” – was the cliffhanger on which this season left him. He’s spent the year trying hard to move away from the ‘old’ Don, only to find the consequences of his actions pushing him back into that role ever more. Will he have the strength to resist?

It’s been a great season, which was a relief after having waited nearly two years to see it. Matthew Weiner has, as ever, kept the show’s slow burning moodiness and character depth, so that truly dramatic events, when they come, are all the more shocking for it. It’s sad that we won’t be seeing any more of Lane, who really came into his own this year in terms of deep plotlines both humorous and sad, and Jared Harris deserves a nod for his likeable performance over the last three seasons. And I’m glad to see that Peggy’s departure from SCDP doesn’t mean her departure from the show. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait as long for the next season as we did for this one!

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 12–Commissions and Fees

SPOILER WARNING – THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES MAJOR PLOT POINTS . DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 12 YET.

“What is happiness? It’s the moment before you want more happiness.”

This week in Mad Men, nearly everyone was having a bad day – some worse than others. This was signified by a number of exchanges in which world-weary characters actually declared, “I’ve had a bad day.” Well, that’s not unusual for this show, but this instalment seemed to up the ante. After last week’s dramatic power house of an episode, this one felt more low key, the character arcs and plot development ambling along sedately – until a massive shock brought it all to an abrupt halt with the departure of the second major character in as many weeks.

Perhaps it was the winter setting – snowflakes visibly falling outside every window – but from the beginning there seemed a palpable sense of gloom throughout. There was the usual sense of existential angst and inertia at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, with the events of recent weeks hanging sullen in the air. Despite securing the prestigious Jaguar account, nobody’s happy – and indeed the subject of happiness (or the lack of it) was a recurring theme in the episode, with many of the characters dwelling on it at various points.

Initially, the most unhappy (as usual) was Don, for a number of reasons. He’s obviously still smarting from last week’s deal with the devil that enabled Joan to gain a partnership by means of actual prostitution. He’s not just angry with the rest of the partners (“Should I just leave the room so you can vote without me?”), but plainly with Joan too for lowering herself to those standards. It probably doesn’t help that at the partners’ meeting Joan proves herself awesomely capable, signifying that this is a position she should have been given a long time ago.

But he’s also unhappy that, for an American ad agency, the account for a notoriously unreliable British luxury car is pretty middling stuff. This becomes clear in a meeting with Roger, as Don declares, “I don’t want Jaguar, I want Chevy!” Perhaps Roger is less ambitious than Don; he’s involved in yet another meaningless affair with a too-young girl, and recognises that it’s not making him happy but thinks it’s the best he can do.

Don, however, is having none of it. He honestly thinks Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce isn’t trying hard enough, and is still smarting from his recent chat with the Ed Baxter, head of Dow Chemicals and father in law to the usually principled Ken Cosgrove. Baxter, played by the marvellously slimy Ray Wise, had told Don that many major companies would never work with him because of the anti-smoking ad he put out to save face over losing the Lucky Strike account.

Don being Don, Dow is thus obviously his ultimate challenge – even Roger refers to it as “the Moby Dick of accounts”. But Don seems to feel that SCDP has been resting on its laurels (despite the Jaguar account) and it’s time to go hunting that white whale. This he does in a meeting heavy with hidden meaning after Roger has placated the surprisingly hard nosed Ken. Ken will put up no resistance – providing he can be “forced” onto the account and Pete Campbell will have no involvement at all. This was a bit of a revelation; we know Pete’s hard to like, but it was a surprise that even the usually mild Ken would be so ruthless towards him.

With that sorted, Don and Roger are free to meet with Baxter and the finance and marketing supremos of Dow. More than anything, this scene set out the themes of the episode. Don thinks that Dow’s current agency are just coasting, and that the company’s complacent for being satisfied with 50% market share. He’s projecting of course – he’s not happy with everything he has, so why should Dow Chemicals be? Addressing the idea of happiness head on, he comments, “what is happiness? It’s the moment before you want more happiness.”

If anything, that’s the philosophy of the show in a nutshell. Don’s reaching, ambitiously, like the very embodiment of the American Dream. And yet, however much he achieves, it’s never enough – the dream is hollow, no matter how nobly we strive. It’s heavily significant that he’s expressing these sentiments to Dow Chemicals, whose involvement in the Vietnam War was so crucial; the script even spelled that out by having him comment on the history of napalm, one of their most famous products. The implication was that Don’s ambition lacked any principle. He’s prepared to be a gentleman about Joan Harris, but he has no compunction over advertising a company that produces such a horrible weapon. I wonder if Don votes Republican?

Don also has to put up with Sally, herself as unhappy as usual in her relationship with her mother. Sally was being as wilful and spoilt as usual, refusing to go on Betty and Henry’s ski trip and preferring to foist herself on her harried father. Betty, typically, is fine with that – anything to get the burdensome Sally out of her hair, and ‘coincidentally’ to make things awkward for Don.

But with Don busily preparing for his meeting with Dow, and Megan off to another audition, Sally has to be left alone in the apartment on Monday morning. It was no surprise that she secretly arranged a trip to the Natural History Museum with sort-of-boyfriend Glen, who absconded from his boarding school just to see her. Their scenes in the museum, nicely played by Kiernan Shipka and Marten Weiner, were interrupted as Sally had the shock of discovering her first period. Mad Men delights in putting all its characters through the wringer, and in Sally’s case the shocks and depression are nearly always to do with her burgeoning sexuality.

Surprisingly, though, when she ran off and deserted Glen, it was Betty she ran to and not Megan. Even more surprisingly, Betty for once acted like a caring mother, soothing Sally’s worries, and holding her on the bed. Perhaps the evidence of Sally’s imminent womanhood has given Betty a sudden facility for empathy, based on her own experiences. But she still can’t resist playing one-upmanship with Megan, smugly pointing out over the phone that it was Betty that Sally ran to, and not her stepmother.

Lane Pryce at least started the episode feeling good – he’s been invited to join the fiscal committee of the prestigious American Association of Advertising Agencies. But this is Mad Men, and no-one’s allowed to stay happy for long. In Lane’s case, his fall from grace came surprisingly early on, as Bert Cooper, having stumbled on the cheque with Don’s forged signature, furiously asks Don why he’s given Lane the Christmas bonus that the partners were supposed to foreswear.

Don, of course, knows that he never signed such a cheque. Even mired in his usual angst, he’s a smart and shrewd man, and works out immediately what’s going on. Cue an agonising scene in his office as he demands the resignation of the weeping Lane, to whom the appearance of respectability is everything. Jared Harris crumbled magnificently as Lane for his last episode, venting all the despair that his character has been prone to for the last couple of years.

Don at least has the sensitivity to keep Lane’s crime confidential, and gives him advice on what to tell his wife. He’s projecting again, seeing echoes of his own history – “I’ve started over a lot. Believe me, this is the hardest part.” But Lane isn’t Don; his facade is far more fragile. It doesn’t help that when he gets home, he discovers his wife has bought him a very expensive present – with his own chequebook. In a supreme display of irony, It’s a Jaguar XKE. Having spent the afternoon trying to drink away his despair, Lane does the only thing left to him – he goes and pukes in a corner.

It was a blackly humorous moment, but not the blackest. Lane’s gradual unravelling was interspersed throughout the episode, and it came as no surprise to find him ultimately preparing to commit suicide by gassing himself with the exhaust of that very same Jag. Except, in a moment of unexpected humour that cleverly undermined this poetic gesture, the Jag, typically, wouldn’t start. Even in the circumstances, it was impossible not to laugh as poor old Lane poked about the engine hopelessly, holding one lens of his snapped glasses to his face. Even suicide won’t work out for him.

At least for a while. The final scenes of the episode were truly shocking, as Joan, suspicious of Lane’s locked office door, gets Pete to peer through his adjoining window. After the abortive Jag attempt, Lane had gone to the office and hung himself. Even the usually composed Joan was weeping, while the men looked like they’d been kicked in the balls. Real life, in all its horror, had intruded on the office of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, a singularly unusual experience.

Don and Roger, returning from the meeting with Dow, found the office eerily deserted, with only the shocked (surviving) partners left. Typically, it was Don, with his sense of decency, who demanded that Lane be cut down despite Pete’s protestations that it was a crime scene that shouldn’t be interfered with. This was shown in shocking, unpleasant detail; previously the director had shied away from actually showing Lane’s dangling corpse, and I’d expected it to remain unseen.

That just rendered it all the more shocking when we saw Jared Harris hanging, grey-faced, from his office door. Don, Roger and Pete looked genuinely sick as they cut him down; Harris has said that these were genuine reactions, so presumably Jon Hamm, John Slattery and Vincent Kartheiser were seeing this grimly realistic tableau for the first time. For Don in particular, the look of horror was especially redolent. Not only is he presumably feeling guilty at having provoked Lane’s desperate actions, this isn’t the first time he’s felt responsible for a suicide by hanging; way back in the first season, his (ie Dick Whitman’s) half brother died in the same way, after Don’s rejection.

It was a startling and shocking end to an otherwise low key episode, the sudden horror all too real from my own experiences of suicides. Jared Harris has been great as Lane, and the episode rightly gave him plenty of good material in his last performance. In a script so heavily freighted with references to unhappiness, it was fitting that one of its worst possible consequences should provide the climax. Don was perfectly right in the way he dealt with Lane’s crime; but I’m sure that will be cold comfort to him. The episode ended with him at least being able to make one person happy, as he let Glen drive the car back to boarding school. It felt like a small crumb of comfort in a very bleak penultimate episode. But then, this is Mad Men; bleak is what they do.

Game of Thrones: Season 2, Episode 10–Valar Morghulis

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 10 YET.

“This war has just begun. It will last for years.”

After the tumultuous excitement of last week’s Battle of Blackwater Bay, Game of Thrones’ season finale had a hard act to follow. Since last week seemed like a climax to the story, there was always the danger that this season ending would come across more like an epilogue. Yet it pulled off the hard trick of being an exciting finale in its own right, given a little more running time than usual to catch up on all the other plots left hanging from episode 8 and setting up situations and journeys for next year’s third season.

With so much to catch up on, I rather expected the aftermath of the battle for King’s Landing to be skipped over quite briefly, but even this was given a fair amount of screentime. Joffrey held court in the throne room, doling out rewards for his allies, most notably Margery Tyrell. With Cersei having cleared it with the Small Council and Pycelle with the High Septon, Joffrey’s show of obedience to his betrothal to Sansa was set aside in favour of Loras’ scheming sister – much to Sansa’s relief.

Natalie Dormer gave a subtle, intriguing performance as Margery, with her established political ambition – to be THE Queen – now in sight. Sansa, for her part, found her relief shortlived when Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen’s Irish accent none too well suppressed) enlightened her that the sadistic boy king could still beat her and take her in the bedroom. It was a revealing exchange, obviously setting up future plotlines – when Baelish commented that Sansa was “just like her mother”, it set off warning bells, as we already know of his deep unrequited feelings for Catelyn Stark. Meanwhile, you have to wonder if the smugly satisfied, fickle Margery knows quite what she’s let herself in for agreeing to marry Joffrey…

Tyrion too found the future uncertain, as Varys paid a visit to his sickbed. First though, Grand Maester Pycelle got a bit of payback for Tyrion’s earlier imprisonment of him, taking oily delight in informing him that Tywin had taken over as Hand of the King, and Tyrion was now, basically, nothing in the court. It’s a small role, Pycelle, but genre favourite Julian Glover has made him a truly loathsome schemer. The schadenfreud as he tossed Tyrion a coin – “for your trouble” – was perfectly played.

Varys got a fair bit to do this week too, which was great for fans of Conleth Hill’s silky, evasive performance as the court spymaster. After informing Tyrion that, whatever the history books might say, some at least would remember him as the saviour of King’s Landing, Varys also got a nice little scene with Ros (Esme Bianco), as he proved immune to her allure but instead of sex bought her complicity as an informant. “Littlefinger sees you as a collection of profitable holes,” he purred silkily, “but I see you as a future partner.”

It was a good scene and well played by both – I particularly liked the expression on Ros’ face when she discovered that there was nothing between Varys’ legs to manipulate. But it was also the first (and not the last) moment that made me wonder about how exactly the characters got to that point, a casualty, presumably, of trying to squeeze such a lengthy, complex book into ten episodes of TV. When last we saw Ros, she was a captive of Cersei, in the mistaken belief that she was Tyrion’s whore. No explanation was given for her current freedom – had Cersei realised her mistake?

At least we got clarity that Tyrion’s attacker in the battle was actually a paid assassin for Cersei, a rare clear explanation in a show full of duplicitous scheming (unless of course Varys was lying). Tyrion’s future in the capital is now evidently perilous, but as he admits to Shae, he loves the game far too much to give it up and escape to obscurity. Peter Dinklage, the breakout star of the show’s first season, has been elevated to top billing in the credits this year, and it’s clearly deserved.

As I say, it was a surprise that the characters in King’s Landing got so much attention with so many other plotlines to resolve or move on, but all got their due moment in showrunners’ Benioff and Weiss’ script. Some were dealt with more quickly than others, but even these had complex, well-played scenes – even if it was only one each.

So we briefly caught up with Arya, Gendry and Hot Pie, now wandering the wastes outside Harrenhal, for just one quick but significant scene. Jaqen H’gar popped up (as if by magic) to explain himself and offer Arya a place with ‘the Faceless Men’, a mysterious-sounding group of which he is presumably one. Maisie Williams as Arya looked tempted, but had to refuse, preferring to try and reunite her family (good luck with that one, they’re all over the Seven Kingdoms). But Jaqen wasn’t quite done with her, giving her a strange coin and the codewords “valar morghulis”, should she wish to find him again. Then he changed his face utterly and was gone, a different man. It was a nicely subtle bit of the magic that the show uses so sparingly, but I have to say I’ll miss German actor Tom Wlaschiha as Jaqen.

Brienne and Jaime, clearly now another of the show’s excellent double acts, also got one scene to continue their journey towards King’s Landing. Probably not strictly necessary as it didn’t advance their storyline one bit, but useful as a reminder of where they were, and where they were going. It also gave Brienne, finally, a chance to show what a badass she truly is as they were confronted by a trio of too-inquisitive Stark soldiers, who had previously killed three girls for the simple crime of flirting with Lannisters. After the initial bluff failed and the thugs recognised Jaime for who he was, Brienne slaughtered them all in a single-handed display of the show’s trademark gore. Gods know where she shoved the sword in her last victim – even this show backed off from displaying that clearly – but it looked like a very painful end.

Up at Dragonstone, Stannis too got a single scene to lick his wounds after his defeat at Blackwater, and take it out on Melisandre, whose prophecies of victory now seemed hollow. Carice van Houten as Melisandre yet again pulled out the stops in her portrayal of the Red Priestess as a mysterious, yet alluring sexual presence. Even the furious Stannis couldn’t – quite – bring himself to strangle her, and their scene together ended with him yet again utterly in her thrall, gazing eagerly into the flames of her god’s visions. The Battle of Blackwater may be over, but it’s clear that for Stannis, this is just a pause in the war…

Robb Stark too was pausing in the fight – in his case because right now, love was preferable to war. He’s besotted enough with Talisa to actually marry her, in a typically flame lit night scene, despite his mother’s warnings about arousing the wrath of Walder Frey. All this happened offscreen (as it were) in the books, with Robb turning up married as a fait accompli. Here, Richard Madden and Michelle Fairlie got a good scene as Catelyn reminded Robb that hers too had been an arranged marriage, and she and Ned had grown to love each other “stone by stone”. But Robb wasn’t listening (when does young love ever?) and you can see upcoming trouble for him being telegraphed from miles away.

There was also Theon Greyjoy’s increasingly tenuous-looking occupation of Winterfell to resolve before the season was out, and that was done with subversive brevity. Theon got a contemplative scene with the ever-thoughtful Maester Luwin as Northern troops surrounded the castle, hopelessly outnumbering him. The dialogue was as revealing as ever; Luwin told him, “you’re not the man you’re pretending to be. Not yet.”, to which Theon could only helplessly reply, “It’s too late for me to pretend to be anyone else.”

Too late indeed, as he gave a genuinely rousing speech to spur his twenty men into glorious deaths against the five hundred opposing them. But even his own men have had enough of him, and plainly would rather live than have songs sung about their deaths. So Dagmer promptly clobbered Theon as soon as he’d finished (“it was a good speech”), and dragged him off with a bag over his head. It was now clear (if it hadn’t been before) that Dagmer, played by the reliably loathsome Ralph Ineson (Finchy from The Office) was a conflation of both his own character from the books and that of the equally loathsome Reek. In a show with such an enormous ensemble cast, reducing the character list by combining similar ones is probably a very wise way to go.

But here too we had evidence of problems squeezing the book’s sheer amount of detail into the TV show’s comparatively short run. Bran, Rickon, Osha and Hodor emerged from their crypt hideout to discover Winterfell burned out and ruined, and Maester Luwin dying in the Godswood. Yet there was no sign of the Northern troops that had so outnumbered the Ironmen, and no indication of why they would simply abandon Winterfell when it’s the ancestral seat of the King in the North. It seemed likely that it was the fleeing Ironmen who’d actually torched the place, but having previously established that a Stark-friendly army was camped outside, you had to wonder why there was no one left when the Stark boys came out of hiding.

Still, they too have been set on a new course for next season. Advised by the dying Luwin to head for the Wall and the help of Jon Snow, the last we saw of Bran, Rickon, Osha and Hodor was them fleeing the smoking ruins of Winterfell and heading North.

Over the sea in Qarth, we had to deal with Dany’s resolve to go to the scary sounding House of the Undying to rescue her dragons from the cadaverous warlock Pyat Pree. This is one of the weirder scenes in the book, with magic and illusion leaving you questioning how much of what Dany sees in the mysterious building is actually real. Here, sensibly, this surreal journey was somewhat simplified. But we still got some magnificent visuals of Dany’s hallucinatory journey, finding herself first in the ruined, roofless and snowy throne room in King’s Landing, then venturing North of the Wall to where she found a Dothraki tent. Inside, we got an unexpected, and most welcome, return for Jason Momoa as her deceased love Khal Drogo, clutching their child, a vision of the life Dany was forever denied. Emilia Clarke again gave a splendidly mature performance as she rejected the vision’s falsity, even in the face of being reunited with her one true love.

But she still had to deal with Pree, who was doing his familiar trick of appearing in multiple places while magicking chains onto Dany next to her equally chained dragons. We then got one of the show’s truly triumphant moments as Dany exhorted the small creatures to incinerate the treacherous warlock, breaking his magical chains. The shot of her defiant, with the dragons roaring flame like flamethrowers, was awesome. It also made you realise what a fearsome weapon these creatures will be when they’re fully grown; they’re only the size of cats, and they can already incinerate a man from across a room.

And Dany wasn’t done with her betrayers, catching Xaro Xhoan Daxos in bed with her treacherous handmaiden Doreah. Taking the key to his mysterious vault, she found it empty of the promised riches – Xaro had been nothing more than a conman the whole time. Xaro and Doreah got a truly nasty end, sealed into the dark empty vault to die, and Dany ended this year ransacking the riches of his palace. She’s one step closer to buying the ships she needs to return to Westeros and wage war. And when the dragons are grown, who’ll be able to stand against her?

Finally, we had to catch up with the various parties of the Night’s Watch beyond the Wall. Jon and Qhorin were still being led, tied up, to the wildling camp, and Jon was baited into fighting then killing his legendary colleague. It was less clear than in the book that this was at Qhorin’s own urging, a means to get Jon taken into the wildlings’ confidence as an inside man; but the result was the same. Jon was untied, and the last we saw of him, he was gazing down into a valley filled with what looked like thousands of wildling tents.

Elsewhere, Lord Mormont’s party was again represented by lowly latrine diggers Sam, Edd and Grenn. Their usual fun banter (“It’s no place to live where you have to burn shit to keep warm”) was abruptly interrupted by the unprecedented sound of three blasts on the Rangers’ horn. We’d already established that three blasts, unused for centuries, meant the arrival of the legendary White Walkers, barely glimpsed since the show’s very beginning.

And so it proved, as a terrifying army of undead wights began to stream past the cowering Sam, led by a truly alien-looking blue eyed creature riding an undead horse. It was a genuinely thrilling climax to the season, with the zombies every bit the equal of those in The Walking Dead; and it’s probably a bit churlish to mention that the closing shot, of an undead army advancing on the Watch encampment, was essentially identical to the cliffhanger in Walking Dead’s penultimate episode this year.

It’s been a triumphant second season that’s firmly cemented the show’s success, and established that it can work as an ensemble without a central ‘hero’ figure like Ned Stark to hold it together. It’s also, for practical reasons, compressed or omitted many storylines and characters from the book; though as I’ve remarked, now and then this has left gaping holes in plotlines and character motivations. Sensibly, the showrunners have declared that the next, even longer book will be dealt with over the course of two seasons, and from there it may get even trickier as books four and five take place, for the most part, concurrently. Nonetheless, Game of Thrones is now clearly another great success story for HBO, and I’m already waiting eagerly for the next season.

Prometheus Unwound

Ridley Scott’s ”in-universe” Alien prequel is a mess of beautiful visuals and a muddled, incoherent plot.

NB – LIKE MOST OF MY REVIEWS, THIS DISCUSSES MANY PLOT DETAILS, INCLUDING THE ENDING. SO DON’T READ AHEAD UNLESS YOU a) HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE, OR b) DON’T CARE.

Hype and heavy expectation can be an absolute curse for any movie. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, released this weekend, has a double curse; not only has it been massively hyped, both by Fox and by online forums, it also bears the heavy burden of being – sort of – a prequel to the Alien series, one of the most beloved sci fi franchises in cinema. I’ve been a victim of hype before, many times – Fatal Attraction and Snakes on a Plane leap to mind – and I’ve learned to go in with my expectations lower than the hypers would expect.

Nonetheless, I know Ridley Scott, when on form, to be an immensely talented director. And I wasn’t expecting hordes of toothy xenomorphs due to Scott’s, and the studio’s, insistence that this was only tangentially related to the Alien series, instead taking place “in the same universe”. So I wasn’t coming in as a fanboy eager to see facehugging/chestbursting action, but as a sci fi lover keen to see an ingenious piece of work from a talented director who hasn’t done sci-fi since 1982. A combination, then, of high and low expectations – I wasn’t expecting a ‘proper’ Alien prequel, but I thought with the talent involved that this could be very good.

In the event, I was quite disappointed. Not that Prometheus is a bad film; far from it. It’s impeccably crafted, with Scott’s trademark visual flair, some nice character turns from an undoubtedly talented cast and some genuinely tense (and icky) set pieces. It’s just that, well, as a sum of its parts it doesn’t add up. For this, I think I can largely blame the writer (though I doubt a director of Scott’s reputation had no input into the story). The script for Prometheus has been knocking about Hollywood for years, going through multiple drafts by writer Jon Spaihts, until it ended up in the dubious hands of Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof. As a result, the Prometheus that ultimately made it to the screen suffers from many of the same problems as that iconic series – it has the same lack of closure, explanation and internal logic. Like Lost, it thinks it’s terribly profound and really isn’t.

As the concept drifted further away from being a ‘straight’ Alien prequel, Lindelof clearly felt the desire to do a deeply profound sci fi movie that stood up well on its own. But it can’t escape the ‘baggage’ of being even tangentially connected to Alien, and that’s something it doesn’t coherently address, with the ‘slimy creature’ scenes feeling almost tacked on.

That movie seeks to explore not the Aliens, but the mysterious skeletal figure found “grown out of the chair” in the wrecked spacecraft from the first Alien movie. It’s a good idea (though I seem to recall Dark Horse Publishing doing it years ago in their spinoff comics), and has the potential to be very interesting. The trouble is, Lindelof welds it to another movie entirely, one that tries to tackle Big Philosophical Concepts, but doesn’t quite have the reach to do more than debate them – unsatisfyingly.

Chief among these is the really big one – why are we here? That’s one that writers of all stripes have tried to deal with over the centuries, none very successfully; even the great Douglas Adams could only come up with “42”, so Lindelof seems to be biting off more than he can chew on this.

He chooses to address it by hooking it up to the hoary old idea that humanity was created by visiting alien astronauts millennia ago. This is far from a new concept; most people remember it from Erich von Daniken’s cheesy book Chariots of the Gods in 1968, but even the BBC were doing it back in the 50s – it’s the basic plot of 1959’s Quatermass and the Pit. And of course Doctor Who has done it countless times – the human race in that show has been interfered with by so many aliens, it’s a wonder we don’t all have multiple personality disorder.

Still, it’s a time-honoured sci fi staple, and there’s nothing wrong with relying on those per se. But Prometheus thinks it has something fresh to say on the subject, and it really doesn’t. It deals with the whole issue of creationism in various exchanges; at one point, android crewmember David politely asks why archaeologist Dr Holloway was so keen to find his Makers. “To ask them why they made us,” he responds, to which David says, “I might just as well ask why you made me.” Holloway’s answer – “because we could” – is hardly satisfying, as David points out. Elsewhere, his girlfriend Dr Elizabeth Shaw (not the one out of Doctor Who) is a devout Christian and Creationist. For her, the idea that mankind was ‘made’ by an alien species doesn’t shake her faith at all. “Then who made them?” she enquires, logically.

That, however, is about as philosophical as the movie gets on its Big Question. Those ‘Makers’, of course, are the race from whom that mysterious corpse in the first Alien comes. But really, why did they need to be? The movie could stand up perfectly well (OK, reasonably well… ish) with no connection to that franchise at all. It doesn’t help that the Makers are demystified from that tantalising skeletal carcass by the revelation that its appearance was actually a hi-tech bio-organic spacesuit. Lift off that unsettling ‘skull’ helmet, and underneath there’s just a very tall, buff bald humanoid. Empire magazine’s review puts it best – "So basically they’ve spent two years in cryo to discover that God is Jason Statham."

The movie hinges on the idea that ‘they’ visited primeval Earth (at least I assume it was Earth, it’s not altogether clear in the pre-title sequence), drank a weird black substance inescapably reminiscent of The X Files’ black oil, then fall into a waterfall with DNA unwinding and turning black all over the place. Even after the end of the movie, it’s not clear what’s going on there.

Nor is it ever clear why, having created humanity, they’re so displeased with the results as to want to unleash a fearsome, evolving bio-weapon to destroy it. For, as the archaeological crew dispatched to follow a ‘star map’ found on cave paintings discover, Earth was the ultimate destination of the bio-weapon that turned on them so catastrophically before they could deploy it.

To be clear, there is some very good stuff in this movie. The CG and effects are predictably good (as they should be with a budget this size), and hooked to Ridley Scott’s undeniable genius with visuals. The production design makes nice nods to that seen in the original Alien, with the interior of the Prometheus ship distinctly resembling that of the Nostromo, and the interior of the alien temple/ship closely mirroring HR Giger’s original designs for that.

The cast are also well-chosen. Michael Fassbender’s Lawrence of Arabia-obsessed android David is, as many reviewers have mentioned, the standout. Bleaching his hair to more closely resemble Peter O’Toole in that movie, he also looks very similar to David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Like that character – and so many others in sci fi movies – David is the outsider, looking in on humanity with bemused incomprehension. He’s the creation of aged plutocrat Paul Weyland (Guy Pearce in some extremely unconvincing ‘old’ makeup), and “the nearest thing to a son” Weyland has.

Clearly Weyland’s a bit of a sexist, as it turns out that frosty corporate shark Miss Vickers (Charlize Theron, basically doing the Carter Burke character from Aliens) is actually his daughter. Her character’s less well-handled – she plays it so coldly that it seems like the obvious twist is that she too will be a robot. Until the script cleverly wrongfoots us by having Idris Elba’s salty Captain Janek actually ask her if she is. She responds with an invite for a shag back in her quarters, and nothing more is heard of the issue – presumably she was flesh and blood after all. But that’s dealt with so early that I thought it might have been more interesting for David to be revealed as not a robot after all; sadly, that didn’t happen, as it might have made for a more interesting twist.

Neither have any particularly clear motivation for their actions. With Miss Vickers, there’s the hint that she’s got some serious daddy issues to go along with her voracious capitalism, but it’s not spelled out. David has the incurable curiosity of other ‘outsider’ characters like Spock and Data, but there’s nothing to explain his decision to, basically, spike Dr Holloway’s drink with an alien toxin he knows nothing about. There’s no hint that Weyland, or his company, know anything of the true nature of what awaits them on the barren moon they’re visiting, so it can’t be the usual underhanded dealing we’ve come to expect from other corporate reps in the Alien series.

So did David poison and kill an innocent man, and endanger the whole crew, not to mention Earth itself, out of mischief or malice? No explanation is given. Neither is it clear what he hopes to achieve by allowing Holloway’s girlfriend Dr Shaw to be infected via sex and then gestate an “extremely unusual” pregnancy. Clearly this is part of some kind of a plan, but it’s never followed up on after she escapes the attempts to drug her and conducts an extremely gruesome Caesarean in an automated surgery machine.

Still, that C-section – and the gruesome wiggling cephalopod it pulled out of Shaw’s abdomen – was one of a number of genuinely icky set pieces that were clearly aiming to rival John Hurt’s ‘birth’ scene in Alien. Elsewhere, stranded crewmembers Rafe Spall and Sean Harris were attacked by a nasty looking tentacle that broke Spall’s arm and plunged Harris facefirst into a pool of black oil, infecting him; and Holloway, peering anxiously into the mirror, was horrified when a minute black tentacle began waving in his iris.

But this just highlighted the movie’s all-over-the-place pacing. It started out slow and atmospheric; no problem there. But each time something nasty happened, and it felt like things were about to ramp up in pace, the movie slowed right back down again afterward. It wasn’t until the final, explosive twenty minutes or so that it felt like it really got going. And even then, it didn’t really make a lot of sense.

With one of the Makers still alive, having decapitated David and beaten Weyland to death, it launched its ship, destination – presumably – Earth. The three remaining Prometheus crew then seemed to accept their fate – to ram the ship with their own and die – with remarkable alacrity. Perhaps if they’d been given much in the way of character up till that point, their noble self-sacrifice might have been more emotionally resonant. As it was, you just wondered why they went along with the idea so readily.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to like Prometheus – perhaps too much. Even as it stood, it might have worked as a standalone bit of mystic sci fi, even without satisfying much on its existential questions, like the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Sphere. But tying it into the Alien franchise (via the “same universe” at least) did it few favours. It left too may loose ends, even on its own terms, setting up a lot of questions that are never really answered (like Lost) about the involvement of the Makers in the creation of humanity and their subsequent displeasure with the results.

Firstly, what was the opening sequence all about? Why did that alien take a substance that corrupted his DNA then fall into a waterfall? I’ve read some theories that it was meant to be the ‘seeding’ of life on Earth, but that didn’t look totally lifeless to me. Plus, the DNA we saw was turning black, not usually a good sign.

Second, while I get that the Makers are developing an evolving bio weapon (that will presumably evolve into the xenomorph seen in earlier films), it’s far from clear why they’re doing it or what precisely it does. It makes Sean Harris turn into a hyperactive zombie with a swollen head, while it causes Noomi Rapace to ‘give birth’ to a cephalopod (with, apparently, no later ill effects from the contamination). I don’t mind a film where I have to reason out the plot without direct exposition, but this didn’t even offer me the pieces to do that in any definitive way.

Third, I know that it’s not specifically an Alien film, but it is definitely a prequel of sorts. Yet it doesn’t end up with the Maker who inexplicably got so angry with Mankind sitting in the chair where he was discovered in Alien; he dies, his chest burst open, on Prometheus’ lifeboat. So that one can’t have been the one from Alien, unless he dragged his burst carcass back over to the wrecked ship. The script does make clear that there are plenty of other ships on that moon, so it could be another, but I fail to see how a sequel can manoeuvre another of the Makers into that position without, essentially, repeating what was done here.

Ultimately, I felt that, like Lost, it tried to hard to grapple with Big Philosophical Concepts without really having the reach to do so. I like Ridley Scott, and his visual flair was still very much in evidence. But surely at some point Scott must have said, "but this doesn’t make any sense!". Because I certainly said that a lot. Prometheus is a movie that tries too hard in every way, and falls short each time. It’s not a bad film; but it’s not a good one either, and certainly not the masterpiece the pre-publicity was heavily hinting at it being. It’s basically beautifully made fan fiction, with all the plus and minus (but mostly minus) points associated with that.

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 11–The Other Woman

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 11 YET.

“Don’t fool yourself. This is some very dirty business.”

With just three episodes left this season (including this one), Mad Men continues to impress, this week presenting one of the most powerful, heartrending instalments the show’s ever done. With perhaps a tighter focus than usual, this week’s episode directly addressed one of the themes that’s been ever-present throughout the show’s run – the gender politics of its 60s setting, and in particular the thoughtless, unjust treatment of women that even good men – like Don – just don’t understand.

The script focuses almost exclusively on the travails of Joan, Peggy and even Megan to make its point. Not that the male characters are absent; indeed, they get as much screen time as the women, with some telling character points of their own. But they’re primarily there to demonstrate just what a bad lot in life women – even massively capable ones like Joan, Peggy and Megan – got in 1966.

It was an angry script by writer Semi Chellas (with the usual input from showrunner Matthew Weiner) that accomplished its aims fairly straightforwardly, but not without some real dramatic inventiveness. Ostensibly, the ‘story’ – fitting neatly into the show’s current arc – was about the progress of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s bid for the Jaguar account. But in every way, the story was used to reflect the injustice to which women were routinely subjected at the time.

The script set out its stall fairly early on, with a business dinner between Pete, Ken and Jaguar Dealers’ Association head Herb Rennet. Herb, a slimy, pudgy sort of fellow, doesn’t mince words; he’ll give them his vote, conditional on the promise of a night with the ‘stunning redhead’ who showed him around the office – Joan Harris. Initially, this looked like the sort of thing the show often does, setting up the inherent sexism of the period for being knocked down fairly quickly. We know Pete’s a spineless, unprincipled wanker, but surely even he would baulk at pimping out the formidable Joan for a fast buck?

But no, despite Ken’s immediate reaction of “no way”, Pete not only didn’t rule it out, but made a hilariously hamfisted attempt to make this indecent proposal to Joan as ‘indirectly’ as he could. At this point, the plotline was still funny enough to provoke laughter, with Pete’s clumsy attempts at obfuscation more than matched by exactly the kind of frosty looks you’d expect from Joan. But the humour rapidly began to dissipate as Pete took her at her word – “you couldn’t afford it” – and convened a partners’ meeting to discuss exactly what they could afford to offer her.

As I say, the script had stopped aiming the idea at humour, and what replaced it was outrage. To be fair, Don at least had the decency to walk straight out, saying that if this was what it took, he didn’t want the account. But none of the others had the decency to rule out the idea – not Lane,who recently tried to kiss Joan, not Roger, who’s actually fathered a child with her, not even the usually principled Bert Cooper. Dazzled by the promise of a prestigious auto account, they were all prepared to ask a woman they’d worked with and respected for many years to prostitute herself to further their business.

Lane at least did seem to demur, which almost gave him a shred of decency; but it was clear that he was terrified of offering Joan the prospective $50,000, since he’s already fraudulently obtained that on company credit to pay off his own tax debts. That plotline, clearly hanging over Lane’s head, was what encouraged him, via a conversation made almost entirely out of obfuscation, to give her the idea of asking for a partnership instead. Let’s be clear – Lane wasn’t against pimping out this woman he has feelings for. He just didn’t want it to happen if it revealed that he’s been embezzling the company. That’s far from a high-minded declaration of principle.

Even then, I couldn’t see Joan agreeing to do this. She’s been one of the most self-assured, capable, principled characters on the show since it began. Surely she wouldn’t agree to sell her body in order to further her career? And yet the script gave us a plausible scenario as to why she would give in to the idea of sleeping her way to the top. With her husband divorcing her, her baby to bring up, and now her refrigerator breaking down with no money left to fix it, she’s at her wit’s end. What’s being suggested is horrible – but pragmatically, can she afford to reject the idea? So she went to Pete, and forthrightly declared that she’d do it – in exchange for the 5% partnership, and no negotiation.

The prospect of a character you’ve come to like having to stoop to such depths was truly horrifying, but even then, I found it hard to believe she’d go through with it. When Don found out what the other partners had agreed to in his absence, he hotfooted it straight to Joan’s apartment to play Knight in Shining Armour and talk her out of it. But, as if to prove that Don’s good intentions don’t matter a jot, and that he doesn’t really understand the position Joan’s in, he was too late.

Not that this was immediately clear. At first, it seemed like he’d arrived in the nick of time, and Joan was having second thoughts. But then, Don’s pitch to the Jaguar panel – not coincidentally describing the XKE in the most misogynist terms of femininity – was cleverly intercut with the sequence of Joan having visited the loathsome Rennet the night before. It was heartbreaking to see the self-loathing on Joan’s face as she turned to allow him to undo her bra.

Even then, the intercutting of the sequence kept us guessing. Surely Joan would have second thoughts, politely tell the pudgy car dealer she couldn’t go through with it, and leave? But no, as Don came to the climax of his pitch (tellingly, it was “Jaguar – at last something beautiful you can truly own”), we realised that Joan had gone through with it after all. As she lay naked in bed with the less than attractive Rennet then turned away from him in discreet loathing, it was hard to hold back a tear. And then we went back to the scene of Don arriving at the apartment, realising then that he’d arrived after Joan had gone through with it. No wonder she was about to take a shower.

Was Joan right to do what she did, from a pragmatic viewpoint of a much overdue furtherance to her career? It’s hard to judge, given the presumably accurate portrayal of the attitudes of the time. Certainly, her expression at the partners’ meeting – when Jaguar confirmed their acceptance of the proposal – was all steely business, feeling suppressed. But her telling exchange of looks with a horrified Don showed there was more under the surface than just pragmatism and acceptance. It was a masterful performance from Christina Hendricks throughout, and given Joan’s bonding with Don last week, I wonder if the two are about to have a long, soul-searching chat again.

For all Don’s well-intentioned chivalry though, the far more lightweight (but still angry) plotline about Megan’s audition showed that he’s just as much of a sexist dinosaur as his colleagues. He may not want women to debase themselves (not that this has always bothered him), but he just doesn’t get that the women he knows might want to succeed on their own terms, without his ‘gentlemanly’ help. Certainly when Megan reveals that, should she get the role, she’ll be off touring for months on end, Don’s immediate reaction is to abandon his previous tolerance and forbid it outright. Megan’s angry assertion that he only allowed her to follow her dream because he expected her to fail looked dead on the money to me.

I’m still doubtful over Megan as an ongoing character. As commented on this blog a couple of weeks ago, she’s often seemed too perfect, lacking the flaws of the rest of the characters and acting more as a foil for Don than a person in her own right. But Semi Chellas’ script made me genuinely feel for her. First she had to endure the realisation that her husband had no confidence in her abilities (despite that he still wants her advice about the Jaguar pitch). Then, in a brief but telling scene, it became obvious that her audition callback was less about her acting ability than the shape of her rear end. And for all that Don was ready to be the Comforting Husband, you got the impression that he still didn’t understand.

But when it came to Don Just Not Getting It, this was small fry compared to the episode’s other big storyline – his treatment of Peggy. In the stress and furore of recent weeks, he’s been consistently treating her more like a doormat than a protege, and this week she’d finally had enough.

The last straw came when, having pitched a brilliant proposal to Chevalier LeBlanc perfume in Ginsberg’s absence (and after having refused to be described as his subordinate), Peggy found Don’s first reaction to be that he’d hand the idea straight to Ginsberg as soon as he was finished with Jaguar. And then, to add insult to injury, he took Peggy’s aggravation as a sign that she just wanted the account to get a free trip to Paris. Peggy, to her credit, immediately decided that she was worth more than that, and went out looking for better opportunities with the competition, where she might be recognised as worthy on her own terms.

Not surprisingly, Don’s old nemesis Ted Chaough was more than willing to make her an offer – in fact, he was prepared to exceed her original demand by $1000 a year. It’s nice to hope that he did this out of recognition of her abilities (and that probably was a factor), but given the way we’d seen women treated throughout the episode, my first thought was that he was making the offer just as a way to stick it to Don.

Peggy’s been an integral character to the show since episode one, and initially I didn’t believe she’d leave SCDP. But in a shock moment, leave she did. And as if to cement the episode’s portrayal of the well-meaning Don Just Not Getting It, his initial assumption was that she was just fishing for a raise, which he was more than prepared to give. He finally Got It when it became clear that, no matter what he offered, his former protege was off to pastures new; as he realised, and both reflected that this was really the end for them, the scene became genuinely tearjerking.

Don’s voice cracked as he refused to let go of Peggy’s hand, his face crumpling; Peggy herself had tears rolling down her otherwise controlled face. It was a hugely emotional scene, brilliantly played by both Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss. As Peggy walked out of SCDP for the last time amid furious partying, unnoticed by all (except, significantly, Joan), it became clear that she really was going. And perhaps now is the right time for that. As has recently become clear, she’s basically already become Don, albeit a female version, and the show doesn’t need two of them. Nonetheless, she’ll be missed.

An incredibly powerful episode overall, that gave Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss in particular a chance to shine, and made me mark Semi Chellas as a writer to look out for. It’s easy for a man, if he’s liberal, to intellectually grasp how badly women were treated in the 60s; it’s quite something else to make him understand it on an emotional level. By rubbing our faces in the injustice suffered by likeable characters we’d known for some time, this episode succeeded at doing just that to an extent that I don’t think even Mad Men has managed before.

Game of Thrones: Season 2, Episode 9–Blackwater

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 9 YET.

“We’ve got brave men knocking at our door. Let’s go kill them!”

Finally, after weeks of moving pawns from place to place, the endgame of Game of Thrones’ second season is here – in the form of the Battle of Blackwater Bay, one of the most fondly remembered set pieces from the book. After the vast majority of battles in Westeros’ civil war taking place offscreen (and cheaply), this was clearly the one the showrunners had been saving up the budget for. A sumptuously mounted, exciting and massively gory conflict, it took up the entirety of the episode, a necessary focus largely absent in recent weeks of jumping from plot to plot. And yet even in the midst of all the carnage, there was room for plenty of the character depth the show is justly renowned for.

Even with the obviously large amount of money spent on staging the battle, book purists may be a trifle dismayed to see some fairly substantial changes in the meticulously described military tactics of Blackwater as described in the original novel. Firstly, and most significantly, the whole battle takes place at night, while it was clearly described as a daylight battle in the book. Night battles were very unusual (though not unheard of) in medieval warfare. Yet it fits in with the general visual style of the show this year. I must say though, the show’s insistence on having so many scenes take place in (authentically dimly lit) darkness has meant that I’ve found myself squinting at the screen to make out what was going on on more than one occasion!

Tyrion’s defensive tactics were also much simplified, perhaps because the lengthy, complex description of the battle in prose would have taken far longer than the one hour of screen time it was allotted here to show. The ruse of allowing Stannis’ fleet entry to the bay virtually unopposed, then cutting off their exit by raising a giant chain across the bay’s mouth, and raining fire on them was completely absent. And while the tactic of destroying the fleet with fireships full of wildfire was present and correct, it was only one fireship that accomplished this, rather than the flotilla of the book. Yet that one ship was more than enough to blow a huge amount of ships out of the water in a superbly realised green inferno; gods know how much wildfire Tyrion stuffed into it, but it went off like a jade mini-nuke.

That, if anything, showed the visual logic of having the battle take place in darkness. The terrifying green explosion, and its subsequent orange fires as the ships began to burn, stood out starkly against the darkness of night in a way it never would have in daylight. It’s indicative that the changes made in the script recognised that this is a different storytelling medium with different requirements both visually and in the structure of the drama. And if book purists have a problem with those differences, they could try taking it up with the screenwriter – one George RR Martin. Internet flame wars aside, I think it’s safe to say that the author of the books knows what he’s doing.

The clever structure of this episode made it clear that Martin is no slouch when it comes to writing for television. We were shown the buildup to the battle (from both sides), then as the fighting got into full swing it was neatly intercut with scenes of the pessimistic Cersei holed up with Sansa and the other palace ladies holed up in the holdfast and fretfully anticipating the outcome. Meanwhile, outside, Tyrion, Bronn, the Hound and even Lancel got to show their true mettle as the carnage progressed.

That said, I did wonder about a bit of intrusive Author Voice in the exchange between Davos Seaworth and his son Matthos as Stannis’ fleet approached the city. Matthos confidently asserted that “the people of King’s Landing did not choose the false king Joffrey Baratheon. They will be glad to see his head on a spike”, to which the older and wiser Davos contended, “the people won’t see us as liberators. All they’ll see is that we’re trying to burn their city.”

While true enough, this felt like a somewhat hamfisted attempt to parallel Stannis’ imminent attack with recent ’wars of liberation’ which have found the US welcomed less sympathetically than they expected. As an allusion, it works well enough; but I’ve already had enough of real historical wars being paralleled with US adventures in the Middle East, in the recent BBC Robin Hood and the movie Kingdom of Heaven among others.

Still, that’s just a personal view; it wasn’t out of character for either Seaworth to express those views. And the rest of the characters were written as well as you would expect from the man who created them. Bronn and the Hound in particular were well-served this week, as the setup of their initial antagonism (nearly leading to a barfight to the death) led to a hair-raising moment mid-battle as the pyrophobic Hound was charged by a knight who was literally on fire, only to be saved at the last minute by an arrow from Bronn.

Rory McCann as the Hound was superb here, his usual embittered cynicism pushed sharply to the fore by his disillusionment with the King he serves and also by his understandable terror of fire, so plentiful in the battle raging for King’s Landing. This was neatly foreshadowed by his flinching every time a flaming torch came near, leading to the payoff of him fleeing the battlefield with the bitter declaration of, “fuck the king”.

He’s finally, properly deserted now, off to the North perhaps. But before he left, he got another of those tantalising scenes with Sansa, highlighting their weird little relationship. Popping up in her bedroom, he invited her to come with him, promising to take her ‘home’ to Winterfell. Of course, with Winterfell currently held by Theon Greyjoy, and her brothers ostensibly dead, Sansa chose to stay. But the wounded look as the Hound stalked out was almost heartbreaking, like a man who’s just had his last little bit of honour cruelly refused.

Sophie Turner as Sansa got some of the episode’s most thoughtful scenes, mostly paired (as she has been many times in the past) with Lena Headey’s brittle and increasing fragile Cersei. Cersei’s plainly finding power not as rewarding as she expected, as she’s more or less admitted in recent weeks. Now she finds herself cowering, increasingly drunk, in a holdfast as she depends on men to sort out the problem outside. And she’s not optimistic either; those scenes were hovered over by the baleful presence of grim-looking, mute King’s Executioner Ser Ilyn Payne, on hand to spare the women rape by killing them should Stannis prevail.

Cersei did seem to have an increasing despair, as shown by Headey’s bitter smile and sharp tongue. Yet despite her apparent fragility here, we were shown that she’s still very much a force to be reckoned with. Noticing Sansa’s surprisingly lowborn handmaiden Shae, the Queen recognised her as oddly out of place an began to question her with a suspicious and determined look in here eye. Given that we know Cersei’s been torturing Ros in the mistaken belief that she is Tyrion’s whore, there was a lot of suspense here with the possibility that she might discover her mistake.

Fortunately, Shae found herself saved by the bell; or rather, by the arrival of the ever-wet Lancel Lannister, bringing news of the apparently losing battle outside. True to form, Lancel was fairly rubbish throughout. He fled from the battlefield after an arrow hit that seemed less than incapacitating, then cravenly agreed (after a halfhearted objection) to the Queen’s proposal to remove Joffrey from the battle. Yet even Lancel got to display a bit of courage as he eventually tried to tell the Queen that this might well destroy the Lannister chances, only be met by a punch in the chops from the aggrieved Cersei. Safe to say he won’t be returning to her bed any time soon, having made the mistake of underestimating her venom under pressure.

In the thick of the battle itself, Tyrion once again got to show that he can hold his own not just as a politician and tactician, but also as a soldier. With the jittery looking Joffrey having fled to the dubious safety of his mum, it was up to Tyrion to make the inspirational speech that would give the men the heart to follow him into battle. This was nicely done, very much in the style of the classic example, Shakespeare’s Henry V. Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion may tend more to the scatological than Shakespeare’s Henry, but the intended effect was the same. Having finally won the attention of the demoralised troops, he goaded them into action with self-deprecation as he strapped on his armour: “I’m only half a man. What does that make those who refuse to fight?”

Stannis too was in the thick of the fray. Unlike Joffrey, he’s clearly not afraid to lead from the front, and was in the thick of the action as his troops stormed the walls of the city. Said action was increasingly and massively drenched in gore; heads were chopped off, throats were slit, viscera were spilled, and at one point the Hound actually cut someone in half diagonally. Stannis experienced the gore as his mouthy lieutenant, next to him at the wall, had his head pulped by a falling stone from the battlements. It didn’t put him off though, and he was among the first up the siege ladders.

The blood-drenched spectacle of the battle was truly impressive. Apparently showrunners Benioff and Weiss had to convince HBO to up the budget to actually show it, with the original intention to have more of a bottle episode told from the POV of Cersei and Sansa cowering in the holdfast. I’m thankful that HBO agreed; much as the show is great character drama, the absence of onscreen battles in a show centred on a civil war was becoming increasingly conspicuous. That the battle as seen was so exciting should give huge kudos to director Neil Marshall, who started his career with low-budget werewolf horror Dog Soldiers. As that film showed, Marshall is clearly adept at producing the maximum spectacle for the minimum of money.

The battle ended suitably abruptly (as such battles often do) with the surprise arrival of reinforcements led by Tywin Lannister and Loras Tyrell. The tension and atmosphere of doom for the Lannisters had, up till then, been ratcheted to breaking point; Cersei was just about to poison her son Tommen (and herself) as Tywin burst into the room to declare the battle over. Good thing for Tyrion, who’s been dealt a nasty blow, only to be saved by callow squire Podrick. I must say, the slash across his forehead and cheek looked considerably less severe than the injury described in the book, which left him with only half a nose; but then Dinklage has always been a better looking man than the Tyrion the books described.

All told, a massively exciting episode with a nearly faultless script from the author of the books and tight, spectacular direction from Neil Marshall. It was great to hear Lannister anthem of power ‘The Rains of Castermere’ finally, at first raucously sung in a bar, then in a beautifully mournful tone over the end credits. Like Lord of the Rings, the books are full of songs (though they’re less twee than Tolkien’s), and they’ve wisely been kept to a minimum in the show. But this song’s notable for its frequent occurrence, and if composer Ramin Djawadi was to set any of them to music, I’m glad it was this.

With the whole episode forming a set piece of the battle, next week’s ‘epilogue’ is going to have a heavy workload catching up the rest of the plot before season’s end. We’re still awaiting resolution for Dany in Qarth, Robb in the Riverlands and Jon beyond the Wall, to name but a few. It’ll probably be a crowded episode, without the tight focus of this one. But that’s not really a problem; if the season has a climax, it’s the Battle of Blackwater, and thankfully this was no letdown.

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 10–Christmas Waltz

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM SUNDAY NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 10 YET.

“People buy things because it makes them feel happier.”

It’s December 1966 for the guys and girls at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and with Christmas around the corner, what better time for a meditation on all things materialistic and consumerist? For the cash-strapped Lane Pryce and newly single Joan Harris, it’s a meditation about money, but for the not-seen-for-ages Paul Kinsey it’s a literal meditation – he’s joined the Hare Krishnas.

With so many episodes recently having centred around Don and Megan, Peggy and Ginsberg, and Pete and Roger, it was a nice change to have the focus changed to other characters, some of whom have seemed rather neglected of late. Lane and Joan in particular, after having been quite prominent early in the season, have been rather pushed to the background in recent weeks.

Lane, who seems to have brought English reserve to a new level in not acknowledging his depressing life, is finally having the financial meltdown hinted at early in the season. With Europe in 2012 undergoing a similar meltdown, it’s tempting to see Lane’s predicament as a timely comment on current events, though with the caveat that the script must have been written quite some time ago.

Perhaps it’s because he’s a fellow Englishman, but I like Lane, and found his desperate efforts to avoid personal ruin while hiding his money worries even from his own wife simultaneously comic and uncomfortable. We already knew that he’s having problems paying for private school for his son Nigel (a name that telegraphs Englishness for American screenwriters but is far less common here than they think). Now it seems that Her Majesty’s tax office is rather keen to get its hands on the $8000 of back taxes Lane owes. Like, right this minute.

So Lane finally blew his English cool at his wife (“Get back to bed right this minute!”), then proceeded to spend the rest of the episode desperately trying to get the firm in which he’s a partner to pay his tax bill. Plan A was to borrow $50,000 on the firm’s account, then tell the partners that the firm was ‘unexpectedly’ better off than they’d thought to the tune of that amount. Thus, everyone could get an immediate Christmas bonus, Lane’s own being the amount he needed.

That’s some dubious stuff right there, but that plan stalled (like economic growth under David Cameron) when Don, Roger, Pete and Bert weren’t that bothered about getting a bonus so soon. So, it was off to Plan B – forge Don’s signature on a company check. OK, you could see that as an ‘advance’ on Lane’s bonus, but I think it’s basically embezzlement.

And the whole plan was totally torpedoed when Mohawk Airlines temporarily withdraw their business, and all the other partners ‘heroically’ decide to forego their bonuses so the rest of the staff could have some. Lane’s obviously going to be in big trouble quite soon, when he has to explain that he did get a bonus, on a check Don didn’t really sign, from a $50,000 windfall the company didn’t really have. Lane might be in the advantageous position of Chief Finance Officer, but he’s going to be lucky to get away with all that.

Jared Harris was, as ever, excellent as Lane throughout. I particularly enjoyed his sly method of persuading his wife that they didn’t need that Christmas trip to England that he couldn’t afford, and his increasingly badly repressed desperation as his plans went awry and he was reduced to actual thievery from his own company.

Still, with the renewed possibility of business from Jaguar cars, Lane might – just – be able to balance the books before he’s caught. It actually took me a few seconds to figure out what new client Pete was so joyful about, due to the American insistence on pronouncing the name “Jag-wah”, rather than the British “Jag-you-er”. Still, as a classic car enthusiast, their inclusion meant I was blessed with a visit to a New York Jaguar showroom boasting the latest 1966 models.

With Pete having foregone the chance to drive a Mark 2 (just as well considering his inability to drive even an auto transmission American car), it was up to Don and Joan, masquerading as a married couple, to take a test drive. After having spent the last few weeks as an agony aunt for everyone else in the office, it was clearly Joan’s turn to have a horrid time. That’s what happens to any character in this show when the scriptwriter decides to focus on them – it’s never good news.

For Joan, the bad news came in the form of being served divorce papers on behalf of her nasty estranged husband. I thought that was what she wanted anyway, but no, she went ballistic at the (admittedly incompetent) receptionist who allowed her husband’s lawyer into the office, chucking the model Mohawk plane at her. After Lane’s outburst earlier, this was a chance for another normally collected character to explode. Lucky for her, it was Don who was there to pick up the pieces, and off they went to the Jag showroom where the desperately unhappy Joan, quite sensibly, espoused the ‘family car’ Mark 2 in favour of the gorgeous XKE (“also known as the E-Type”, the salesman explained, accurately).

Sadly, we didn’t get to see the XKE cruising the streets of 1966 Manhattan (perhaps its real owner wouldn’t allow that). But it did take Don and Joan to a nearby bar, and one of those trademark Mad Men character revealing discussions. Turns out Joan’s furious at the divorce papers because it’s Greg divorcing her, not the other way round – as though the breakup of the marriage was somehow her fault. This led to an interesting discussion on the merits (or otherwise) of marriage, and Joan’s dating chances as a newly divorced single mother.

Along the way, the theme of materialism, so crucial to the show, was touched on in a big way. Don’s not impressed with the XKE, and Joan thinks it’s because he’s happy (has she been watching the same show I have?). The implication is clear – as Don says, “people buy things because it makes them feel better”. Because in the world as Mad Men sees it, there’s always enough unhappiness to keep consumerism chugging along.

Some people, though, choose to fill the void another way – with religion. A large part of the show was devoted to a slightly less weighty subplot in which Harry Crane had to deal with the return of Paul Kinsey, left behind when the original Sterling Cooper was taken over by McCann Erickson. Kinsey’s been drifting ever downward since, and having hit rock bottom is the perfect target for hip new religion/cult, the Hare Krishnas.

Harry’s usually very much a background character in the show, and it was nice to see him get his own little subplot. The scene of him caught up in a Krishna chantalong was hilarious – and historically interesting, as presumably the ‘Swami’ in charge was the cult’s original founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. But this subplot had its serious side too, once you got over the hilarity of the perma-smiling Kinsey done up in Krishna robes.

Paul’s at rock bottom, and he needs Harry to try and sell a spec script he’s written for Star Trek. Only trouble is, the script, cringingly entitled ‘The Negron Complex’ (“the twist is that the Negrons are white”) is terrible. How can Harry tell his erstwhile friend that his dreams of TV writing are never going to come true? And on top of that, Kinsey’s prospective Krishna girlfriend, the manipulative Lakshmi, then goes and has sex with Harry in his office, to try and ensure that Kinsey’s dream of a return to commercialism will never come true. What’s an embarrassed married ad exec meant to do, refuse?

In the end, Harry came up with the face-saving tactic of telling Paul that “a reader” had loved his script, but they couldn’t take it on. And then giving him $500 to hotfoot it off to LA and live his screenwriting dream. It’s hard to tell whether this was a selfless gesture on Harry’s part to get Paul out of the Krishnas’ (and Lakshmi’s) clutches, or whether it was just a payoff to make sure that the increasingly embarrassing Paul never bothered him again. This being Mad Men, I’d tend toward the latter theory.

So quite a low key episode this week, that nonetheless had things to say, and gave some welcome plot advancement to some characters who’ve been sadly neglected of late. Clearly Joan’s beginning to go through the same kind of existential crisis that Don permanently lives in, and Lane’s more concrete problems seem set to come back and bite him some time soon. With only three more episodes left to savour this season, I’m wondering which of these aspects is going to ramp up in time for the season finale. OK, Mad Men is more restrained than, say, Game of Thrones, but even Mad Men usually ups the dramatic ante for the end of the season. I can’t help wondering whether Lane’s short sighted desperation is about to lead to a crisis for the whole of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Finally, this week’s Hideous Checked Sport Coat count: zero. But Roger more than made up for it with this tasteful shirt:

Game of Thrones: Season 2, Episode 8–The Prince of Winterfell

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 8 YET.

“The day will come when you think you’re safe and happy, and your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth.”

After last week’s thoughtful, introspective episode of Game of Thrones, this week’s seemed to move at breakneck speed as we caught up on literally every plot strand. It had the feel of an endgame, moving players into position for a final battle that will surely come next week.

With so much to catch up on, it was an episode driven more by plot than by the character examination that was so much the centre of the script last week. Each vignette of where the characters were felt more like a snapshot, and with so many to squeeze in, few plotlines got more than a cursory glance. Yet even in all this breathless plot advancement, one or two characters got a little more space for some of those nicely deep dialogue scenes – in particular Robb and Talisa, Stannis and Davos, and Tyrion with both Bronn and Varys.

It was good to see a number of characters who’ve been noticeably absent for quite a while this season. Bronn in particular has been rather missed, his earthy, pragmatic views a perfect counterpoint to Tyrion’s shrewd scheming. It’s clear that King’s Landing is holding its breath for the imminent arrival of Stannis’ feared battle fleet, and each character in the city was preoccupied with this impending doom. So we caught up with Tyrion and Bronn as Tyrion pored over books of strategy while Bronn got bored and cleaned his fingernails.

It was a good scene, with the comic confusion over how to pronounce the name of the ancient maester who wrote the book nicely counterpointed by Bronn’s vivid description of how things would be if the city came under siege. He’s clearly been busy in his new capacity as Commander of the City Watch, rounding up all known thieves in the city. “For… interrogation?” Varys asked silkily, to which Bronn merely replied, “no.”

Yet again, he’s got the more pragmatic view; if it comes to a siege, the most valuable currency will be food, and any canny thief will immediately hoard as much of it as possible. So, get rid of the thieves before they get the chance. Even Varys had to concede the wisdom of this. Bronn’s sledgehammer tactics might lack subtlety, but they’re right for the circumstances.

But Tyrion had more to occupy his mind than just the imminent battle. The ever-vengeful Cersei seemed to have discovered his secret love/whore Shae – except, it turned out, she’d got the wrong whore. Lena Headey was magnificently loathsome as Cersei here, all horrible self-satisfaction with her scheme to hurt her brother; but Peter Dinklage played it well too as Tyrion played along with the mistake in a heartbeat, pretending the captive Ros really was his lover. As Ros, Esme Bianco got only one line, but it was heartfelt: “Remember me.” It gave the sense that she’s not likely to survive this; but then, after her experiences with Littlefinger and Joffrey, she’s plainly discovered that being a whore in the big city is far harder than it used to be in the wilds near Winterfell.

Joffrey himself popped up briefly to be reliably loathsome, surveying the siege preparations with Varys and Tyrion. He’s determined to lead his army into battle (which Cersei sees as a foolhardy move prompted by Tyrion), and both Varys and Tyrion seemed slyly amused at the prospect. But as Joffrey stalked off, these two master manipulators got a nice exchange about the game at which they’re both so good. “I’d like to stay alive and keep playing it,” was Tyrion’s attitude. As Varys said, he’s a far better hand than Jon Arryn or Ned Stark, because he doesn’t let his honour get in the way of how the game is played.

Ned Stark’s shadow hung heavily over the show this week. Robb, bonding ever more closely with Talisa, got to tell of his respect for his father: “he told me he walked with fear in the morning, and went to bed with fear at night”. It wasn’t too surprising that Robb and Talisa finally got it on this week, in a sex scene that was far more modest than usual for this show.

This time, the sex wasn’t for titillation, or to enliven an otherwise dull bit of exposition; it was crucial to the plot, and genuinely romantic rather than the usual lustful, animal couplings favoured by most of the characters. But lest we forget the rather large stumbling block that Robb is already betrothed to one of the Frey daughters, in exchange for access to a vital bridge, the dialogue reminded us of this several times. Again, it’s clear that Robb’s romantic choices are likely to come back and haunt him…

Robb also had to deal with the knotty problem that his mother had set free his most valuable captive. After last week’s cliffhanger, it turned out that Catelyn Stark had actually released Jaime Lannister, as an attempt to get Cersei to release her daughters. I must say, this decision rang truer in the book, with Cat’s maternal instincts equally matched by her political levelheadedness. Here, it seemed a little out of character that the normally pragmatic Lady Stark would sacrifice such a valuable hostage out of such an emotional motive; a fact hammered home when Robb reminded her of the losses of others, and how much was at stake. A misstep in characterisation, perhaps, though a forgivable one. At least it meant that we got a new double act, as Jaime and Brienne sniped and bitched at each other as they made their way south.

One of the other good double acts was split up this week, as Tywin Lannister finally left Harrenhal to head for battle. In the book, he wasn’t there for anything like as long; but in the show, he’s built up an excellent rapport with Arya, who was now frantic to find Jaqen H’gar and have him off the departing Lannister before it was too late.

Unfortunately, Jaqen was off on patrol, and by the time he returned, Tywin was long gone. But he still owed Arya one death, and she masterfully played him by demanding that it should be his own. Honour bound, he had to follow through on that unless Arya released him – which she would only do if he helped her, Gendry and Hot Pie escape from the castle. Jaqen paid up in full, slaughtering the guards offscreen so the trio could simply walk out of the castle.

But, again, the need to cram so much in left a lack in motivation – it’s pretty hard to understand why Gendry and Hot Pie would want to escape, given that they both had menial jobs that kept them alive and off the Lannister radar. Again, their reasons were fleshed out in the book. It’s a long book, and I can understand the need to compress its often verbose complexity, but I think this episode in particular skipped too much, making some characters’ choices hard to fathom.

Just to remind us that Stannis is fast approaching King’s Landing, he and Davos Seaworth got one of the better dialogue scenes aboard his flagship at night. Davos’ reasons for his loyalty have only been hinted at up till now; here, we got the whole backstory of how he’d smuggled food to the besieged Stannis during the civil war against the Targaryens. It was well played by Stephen Dillane and Liam Cunningham, whose Davos is one of the more likeable (and honest) characters in the show. And it also neatly counterpointed the fears of those in King’s Landing – Stannis’ account of his siege, as his men gradually ate the horses, then the cats, then the dogs, served to underline the points Bronn had made earlier.

Siege may well be on Theon’s mind too. His sister finally turned up, to tell him he was a fool and should abandon Winterfell before the Northmen strung him up for killing Bran and Rickon. Well, “fool” wasn’t the word she used – it was actually “cunt”. The show has infrequently used this ultimate weapon of obscenities before, but here it was flung about with casual abandon by plenty of characters, even Cersei. Tyrion got the best use of it, exclaiming, “why are the gods such vicious cunts? Where’s the god of tits and wine?” As a crude Englishman, it’s a word I tend to enjoy for its blunt shock value, but I know that for Americans it’s the ultimate taboo – I wonder how they’ll take to its liberal use here?

Swearing aside, Theon was revealed to have not killed Bran and Rickon after all, but rather the two farmer’s sons from that farm the young Starks chose not to hide at. I’d wondered how long the writers would play the bluff out and let us believe the boys were dead; in the event, it was only for the length of this episode. Probably about right, I think. Still, the fact that those charred corpses weren’t the people we thought they were doesn’t let Theon off the hook at all; if anything, he seems even worse for having killed two children who had no involvement at all. And clearly Bran, overhearing Osha telling Luwin this, is going to be burdened with the kind of guilt Theon seems incapable of.

With all this going on, the script still had time for a few snapshots of plots elsewhere. Catching up with events beyond the Wall was significant, as Jon Snow discovered that star Ranger Qhorin Halfhand had been captured too, and all his men killed – because they were searching for Jon. Clearly Bran’s not the only one who’ll be bearing a burden of guilt. A few miles away, the other Night’s Watch party were digging latrines in the snow, and Sam Tarly (good to see him again) managed to unearth a cache of ancient weapons – knives of ‘dragonglass’ – or obsidian, as we know it. Clearly these are going to be important, but the scene in which they were discovered was still a joy of character dialogue between the lowly latrine diggers of the Watch.

Somewhat less well done was the scene in Qarth, catching us up with Daenerys and Jorah as they debated whether she should flee or accept Pyat Pree’s dubious invitation to the House of the Undying. The whole scene felt perfunctory; no characters were delved into, no plot was advanced. It was as if it was there solely to remind us of what’s happening in this plotline, something the show hasn’t felt the need to do before. Previously, we’ve had multiple episodes go by before returning to a crucial plot point. Why couldn’t that have been done here? Personally, I would have preferred to use the runtime to more adequately explore the motivations of Cat Stark or Gendry, which felt flimsy at best.

A lot went on in this episode, but it almost felt like a holding pattern while the characters were moved to where they need to be for the Big Finale. If anything, the writers tried to cram a little too much in, at the expense of the show’s usually impeccable character depth. That said, this was still pretty good TV; the action and intrigue were compelling. I just wish there’d been a slightly more measured pace, and more judicious decisions about which plots to include or leave out. Still, I gather this will be the last season in which they try to adapt one of Martin’s increasingly lengthy books in its entirety; from hereon in, even an increased episode count wouldn’t allow these massive tomes to be covered in one season each. So this is probably the last time we’ll see an episode that has to feel so … rushed.