Reviews – Page 49 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Being Human: Series 4, Episode 3–The Graveyard Shift

“Sometimes I think the only demons worse than him must be the ones he’s fleeing from.”

After a thoughtful, character building piece in last week’s Being Human, the action (and the convoluted plot) were back with a bang in this week’s episode, The Graveyard Shift. There was a lot going on in Jamie Mathieson’s script – I’d say perhaps too much for one episode, resulting in a slam bang piece that felt like a chapter of a story rather than a story in itself.

Not that there wasn’t plenty to enjoy. Amidst all the plot advancement – Eve’s destiny, the vampire prophecies, the Old Ones heading for Wales in a boat – there was plenty of the character based humour the show seems to be recovering with its new cast. In particular, we learnt a lot this week about Hal, the ultra-repressed, OCD-ridden vampire who refers to his supernatural status as “my condition”. After last week’s cliffhanger, in which Fergus learned of Hal’s return, we got an opening flashback very much in the mould of those we used to see for Mitchell, showing his past as a Big Bad, slaughtering all and sundry with Fergus. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, massively reminiscent of the flashbacks to Angel and Spike’s historical killing sprees in Buffy.

At this point, I think the show needs to be a little bit careful. Up till now, the writers have been at pains to distinguish Hal from Mitchell (though both characters’ resemblance to Angel has never been shied away from). The flashback to 1855 was nicely done, with Fergus and Hal (gratuitously shirtless, not that I minded) covered in blood having slaughtered the inhabitants of a big country house. But Mitchell too was a former Big Bad, revered among the vampire community for his previous life as an unrepentant killer, as frequently shown in flashbacks just like this. As we learn from Fergus, Hal’s past as a vampire Old One is arguably way more prestigious than Mitchell’s. But the similarity was there, and I think the show’s going to have to be careful not to make Hal – in some ways – seem like a carbon copy of his predecessor.

Still, Hal in the present is very much a different vampire to Mitchell. Socially awkward where Mitchell was easy going and blokish, this week saw him forging a more friendly relationship with Tom. The tension is still there, of course – initially, Tom’s carrying stakes around just in case, while Hal almost turns him over to Fergus and the gang. But the episode quite skilfully built the beginning of a believable friendship between the two; not quite on the level of Mitchell and George’s easy mateyness, but by the end of the show, you could see them getting there.

This started by having the aloof Hal having to get a job, in order to pay for the baby stuff that Annie is currently having to spectrally steal from Aldi. In a week which has seen much debate about the UK government’s Workfare (read ‘slave labour’) scheme, with the Work and Pensions Secretary decrying objectors as ‘job snobs’, this was curiously timely. Initially, it seemed like Hal thought counter work in the same cafe as Tom was beneath him; later, though, as they grew closer, a Jaws-style pissing contest over who’d had the worst jobs revealed that Hal had done some pretty grim stuff to earn a living.

Nonetheless, Hal seemed to find the job rather distasteful at first, with his glacier-speed table wiping and lettuce chopping. It was only when he and Tom began to build up that camaraderie you tend to have with your co-workers that he lightened up a it. We got some nicely humorous business with Goth-ish wannabe writer Michaela, who amusingly tried to freak the boys out with her ‘edginess’ (mostly comprising terrible poems and drawings). She resisted the boys’ competition to see who could get her number because they weren’t ‘edgy’ enough – something that would come back to haunt her later.

Michaela, along with vampire recorder Regus, provided much of the broad comedy this week. How funny you found this depended on your tolerance for a character who was a little too broad and comical to be realistic – for me, anyway. Laura Patch put in a good comedy performance, but Being Human has never been that kind of comedy. It was too much like caricature rather than character to be believable.

By contrast, Mark Williams, returning as Regus, pitched the humour of his character just right. It’s nice to see that even a vampire can be a nerd and a loser (“my lunch fought back. I mean, who carries a crowbar to walk the dog?”). Williams played him as genuinely weary of 400 years of being a nobody, thrust into the spotlight by his interpretation of the mysterious prophecy.

He also developed a sweet but creepy rapport with Annie, who was this week struggling to accept Tom and Hal as being more than just lodgers. It’s good that the new trio haven’t just fallen straight into the pattern established when the show began. It’s always traumatic when a beloved flatmate moves out and is replaced by someone you don’t know, and for Annie that’s even harder as both of her ex-flatmates are now dead.

Annie spent a lot of the episode advancing the Big Plot, firstly in a genuinely tense confrontation with Fergus and then in mountains of exposition with Regus. As the oldest hand in the show, Lenora Critchlow has the confidence to pull this off while the boys get all the action, but I’d just as soon see some return to the dark, powerful Annie we’ve occasionally seen before.

Perhaps that will come to pass by the end of this series, but for now, she seems largely stuck with relationship building and comic moments. There was quite a good one of the latter, as Regus blackmailed her into telepathically sharing her memory of her first sexual encounter – only to discover that, being from her point of view, he was actually going to experience what it felt like to have sex with ‘Dave’ (“Don’t worry, I don’t remember it lasting very long”). Annie’s always been the show’s real moral heart, steering George and Mitchell back to the straight and narrow when necessary, and now she seems to have become a den mother in addition. All very well, but I’d like to see her take more of a role in some of the action again.

Said action erupted as Fergus and a gang of vampire heavies turned up to storm the cafe, and there was much shouting, hissing, and brandishing of stakes. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Michaela got caught up with Hal and Tom, only to end up with her throat slashed when Fergus and his heavies crashed into the B&B. Inevitably, the lonely, creepy Regus brought her back as a vampire – this made me groan, but I was relieved that the new happy couple headed off for happier shores. It was a little contrived, but I think that might be my dislike of Michaela as a character colouring my opinion. At least the script got in some not too subtle digs at the vampire-worshipping fangirls. Pointing out Regus’ Twilight T shirt, Michaela asked, “are you taking the piss?”, only to receive the inevitable reply, “well, you started it.”

Still, an actual vampire battle in the B&B was a welcome bit of excitement in a show that has had so much happen between seasons. I was genuinely surprised to see Fergus offed so quickly; Anthony Flanagan has made him a rather good villain, and I expected him to be around a bit longer. There was no sign of Cutler this week either, fisticuffs plainly not being his thing. Still, I believe that makes him the only vampire villain left not in a Hoover bag at this point.

And Hal nailing his colours to the mast after initially convincing Fergus that he was back to his old ways was a superb – and necessary – bit of drama. Up till that point, like Annie, he was undecided whether the flatmates were his actual friends. This was the moment when he decided, and as a consequence convinced them too. I’m very much enjoying Damien Molony as Hal, and hope the show survives its cast change to see a bit more of him.

By the end, then, of a tumultuous episode, we were back with Hal and Tom slouching on the sofa watching TV just as Mitchell and George used to. The point that “it’s similar but different” was made amusingly but unsubtly, as the boys rejected watching “something about conmen” in favour of Antiques Roadshow. Still, as Annie sat down to join them, it felt like something of an equilibrium had been forged with the new trio. In many ways, the show could have ended right there – but no, we still have the Prophecy to deal with, along with a boatload of vampire Old Ones and a ghost from the future intent on killing herself as a child. Still, on this evidence, our new gang of heroes may have bonded well enough to deal with those things.

The Walking Dead: Season 2, Episode 8

SPOILER WARNING – I’M GOING TO TRY AND REVIEW THESE EPISODES AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE TO THE ORIGINAL U.S. TV BROADCAST. IF YOU’RE IN THE U.K., AND PLANNING TO WATCH THE BROADCAST ON FX THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, BE AWARE THAT MAJOR PLOT POINTS WILL BE DISCUSSED!

Nebraska

After the brutal slap in the face (and highly effective it was too) that was the last few minutes of the mid-season finale, AMC’s The Walking Dead is back for what I gather is referred to as a mid-season premiere. I must admit, there were times during the draggy first half of the season that I was tempted to stop watching altogether; or at the very least stop blogging about it. But after the slow burn culminated in that incredibly powerful ending to the first half, I thought I’d give it a chance to get moving again.

And has it? Well no, sad to say, not really. I’m starting to get an almost pathological boredom reaction to the very sight of Hershel’s farm now, so it didn’t help that the action picked up exactly where we left off. Having said that, this was the only thing to do from a dramatic perspective – something very shocking had just happened, that would have a profound effect on all those present. It made sense to pick up where they did. Still, this is a show that’s done non-linear narratives before. How much more effective might it have been, given the widespread criticism of the first half’s slow pace, to throw the viewer into an entirely new, refreshingly different scenario, then reveal in flashbacks how we got there?

Be that as it may, there were at least signs that the show might be starting to pick up the pace. There were, inevitably, more of the interminable arguments in the group, as Rick and Shane shouted at each other about whether what Shane did was the right thing or the bloody stupid thing. But a lot of people are starting to see it Shane’s way now. T-Dog was strongly approving of what Shane did, and even Carl seems to be shifting to the pragmatic, survivalist viewpoint. Only Dale, glaring balefully at Shane while Shane ranted, seems to be mired in the morality of the world that’s gone. By the end of the episode, it’s beginning to look like Rick too has accepted that things can never be what they were.

From a character perspective, this episode was full of people having that kind of realisation. As Carl solemnly told Lori that he would have shot Sophia himself, had he been in that position, we saw the look of sheer horror on Lori’s face. But a child growing up in a post-apocalypse world full of hungry ghouls can’t expect the kind of caring upbringing we expect now.

One of the things the show has done rather well is explore the gulf between our ‘liberal’ morality (as represented by Dale and Lori), and the pragmatic realities of survival in such a situation (as represented by Shane, and increasingly, Andrea). Thankfully, given the zombie genre’s tendency to be a survivalist nutter’s wet dream, it’s come down on neither one side nor the other; and paradoxically, it’s been previously stereotypical redneck Daryl who’s embodied the balance between the two philosophies best.

Daryl, though, was thoroughly disillusioned this episode, as was Carol, who accepted that, really, her daughter had been dead for ages. Hershel too was undergoing that realisation, having witnessed the fact that repeated gunshots won’t stop these ‘people’ unless they’re to the head. Hershel reacted in a rather stereotypical way for an upright Christian having his beliefs shattered; he found the nearest bar and proceeded to get roaringly drunk.

With his daughter Beth in a state of catatonic shock, his medical skills were clearly needed, so off Rick went, accompanied by Glenn, to the local watering hole. All right, fine, that makes sense, despite Lori’s rather selfish misgivings – after all, as ‘leader’ of the group, Rick was taking responsibility for what had happened. But what on earth then possessed Lori to firstly try sending Daryl after them, then recklessly go herself?

It’s no fault of actress Sarah Wayne Callies, but Lori is rapidly becoming the show’s most irritating character, in the same way as all those heroines of trad horror movies who, frustratingly, seem to go out of their way to put themselves in as much danger as possible. With Lori having flipped her car after contrivedly crashing into a handy walker (really, even after the apocalypse, it’s still a good idea to look where you’re going), we’ve got a new plotline. Let’s hope to heaven the gang don’t spend the next six weeks poking round the woods looking for her now; if they do, I really might stop watching.

Conversely though, the bar scene in which Rick, Hershel and Glenn were suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a pair of uncouth survivors was rather splendid. It’s a scene I’ve seen before in most post-apocalypse stories, but it was done well. The introduction of a couple of new characters, after the cabin fever of the endless stay at Hershel’s farm, was refreshing, as was their account of the way things were going in the wider world – I just wish the show would start showing us rather than just telling us about it.

The tension built as Rick was clearly not going to let them at the farm, and they equally plainly weren’t taking “sod off” for an answer. The fact that it culminated in a messy exchange of gunfire was no surprise, but what was a surprise was Rick so readily shooting them. It’s a vital bit of character development as he too starts to become more pragmatic about survival; what it says about his humanity is not too complimentary, but it’s believable.

Still, though, this is a zombie show, remember? After the pretty low zombie count in the season’s first half, I was hoping we’d get a bit more undead action amidst all the character development. As was pointed out, you’d think all that gunfire around the barn would have caught roaming walkers’ attention, and the farm might have been besieged by a herd, our gang having to fight their way out and finally get the show on the move again. Or at the very least, you’d think Rick, Glenn, and Hershel might have drawn a few ghouls to them in that bar.

But no, disappointingly, zombies were still pretty thin on the ground here. I say “on the ground”, as the most we saw of them was the now neutralised corpses outside the barn. There was a moment that genuinely made me jump as one of them turned out to be not so dead after all, but she was quickly dispatched. After that, the only undead gore in evidence was that carelessly placed arm in the pickup full of corpses, as it fell off the side and Andrea, plainly now used to such things, unthinkingly picked it up and threw it back in the truck.

Apart from that, the only walker we saw (for a split second) was the one unwise enough to wander into the road at the precise moment that Lori was paying no attention whatsoever to where she was driving. That zombie may or may not be properly dead now, but he didn’t play much of a part.

And that was it for the zombies this week. Again, I think the show’s reduced budget over its longer running time is becoming far too evident. For a mid-season premiere, this had far too little action. After all, when Doctor Who came back after its unprecedented mid-season break, at least Let’s Kill Hitler actually moved (whether its movement made any sense is another matter entirely). By contrast, The Walking Dead’s mid-season return, while a little pacier than it has been of late, still moves at a zombie’s pace in comparison.

Yes, the character development and exploration of the post-apocalyptic scenario is well done. But as it stands, I can’t say I have so much emotionally invested in these characters to want to spend more time on their ruminations than on progressing the story. If I want an in depth exploration of the day to day realities of life after the end of civilisation, I’ll watch the original Survivors. What I want from The Walking Dead is a pinch of this, but with a lot more action. And on this basis, sadly, I may have to wait a while…

Being Human: Series 4, Episode 2–Being Human 1955

Annie: “Things have changed a lot recently.”
Pearl: “That’s a pity. Over 55 years and I’ve never had to change my lineup.”

OK, this is the episode that’s convinced me I want to stay with this show (though judging by my Facebook friends, I may be in a minority). After the sturm und drang of last week’s Big Plot shenanigans, this week Being Human concentrated – quite rightly I think – on establishing the new characters and their place in the show. Despite the loss of George and Mitchell still being very keenly felt, this was a real return to the blend of comedy and horror that made the show so much fun in the first place. It’s not the show it was, to be sure. But it felt, unlike last week, like a promising new direction.

Lisa McGee’s script was rather excellent; full of quotable lines, it had me by turn laughing my head off and then gasping at the drama. All right, I think the comedy was most to the fore, but it was used to inform the drama (and vice versa) in precisely the way the show used to before it got so hung up on its own mythos.

Oh, the mythos is still there, and we’re obviously going to see some developments this year with the threat of vampire domination and their ongoing war with humanity and the werewolves. I was glad to see that both Fergus and Cutler survived last week’s massacre at the groan-makingly named ‘Stoker Import and Export’ building (though bafflingly they’re still headquartered there).

Of the two, Fergus is the more obvious baddie. Like last week, Anthony Flanagan invested him with genuine menace beneath an apparent bonhomie, and he’s very much a trad vampire with his first response to everything being to kill and feed – “We need fists and fangs”. But charismatic though he is, Cutler is the more interesting of the pair. A ‘vampire of the times’, we first encounter him using homeless people as a ‘focus group’ for his werewolf transformation footage propaganda. Fergus’ first reaction is to immediately kill all the humans (“we missed lunch”), and then more tellingly, compare Cutler to a certain political figure – “we don’t need a vampire Peter Mendelssohn”. Cutler’s withering putdown to this – “Did you mean ‘Mandelson’, or are you calling me a 19th century German composer?” – was gold, and I’m hoping their bickering double act will be a running thing.

Fergus and Cutler aside, we also saw Future Eve (if indeed the ghost from the future is her), who was directing the plot by sending the ailing Leo, together with Hal and Pearl, to see Baby Eve in her capacity as Warchild and Saviour. I’m still not sure about this aspect of the plot, and may have to watch last week’s again – is the ghost from the future really Eve? If so, her mission to kill the infant version of herself, while noble, is a time paradox more head scratching than anything in the Terminator movies.

But these Big Plot aspects were fairly incidental to the episode’s USP, which was, plainly, to set up the new household. It’s being done in a nicely gradual way;we’re already getting used to Tom as the new resident werewolf, and with this in train, here comes new vampire Hal. Only glimpsed last week, this week Damien Molony got a large slice of the action to establish this new bloodsucker as a very different vampire from John Mitchell. He’s far more introverted, with his archaic suit and clipped 1950s English accent (though I’m pretty sure I detected traces of Molony’s real Irish twang once or twice).

He also has an endearing tendency to OCD, with his strange superstitions and rituals. He never stops at petrol stations on the left hand side of the road because it’s bad luck – which must cause problems on dual carriageways, considering we drive on the left in this country. He also has a daily ritual of setting up complex domino chains, but never actually knocks them down, preferring to then carefully put them away.

As he explains, this is a method taught to him by Leo for controlling his primal urges; I like that. For as we saw in an electric confrontation between him, Tom and a slimy pawn shop owner, he could be very dangerous indeed. That scene, with Tom’s initial loathing of the stuffed wolf head leading to the owner pulling a shotgun on him, felt like the writers and the actor really setting the stall out for Hal as a character.

Molony was chilling as he calmly explained what killing was like, how easy and exhilarating it was, and how hard it was to live with afterwards. You got a real sense of how many times he’d learnt this himself. As the shopkeeper said, “you’re either a man of God, or you’re speaking from experience.” Molony’s regretful, faraway look as he replied, “I’m not a man of God.” was perfect, and it was a good one liner the likes of which the show used to do so well. The whole scene reminded me of nothing so much as a scene in Doctor Who story The Happiness Patrol, in which the Doctor, held at gunpoint, calmly and firmly talks his would-be executioners into putting down their guns. I wonder whether the resemblance was intentional?

But we also got Hal’s housemates Leo (werewolf) and Pearl (ghost) turning up with him, in a nicely timed comic bit after Tom had declared that Baby Eve wasn’t going to be suddenly visited by three wise men proclaiming her the Messiah. It had ben pretty well-publicised that the show’s new lineup was going back to the original mix – one vampire, one werewolf, one ghost, so plainly they weren’t going to stay around long. As it turned out though, the resolution of their storyline was every bit as affecting as the characters we’d known since the show began.

As much as the writing, this was down to the actors involved. Tamla Kari as Pearl had a nice interplay with Annie from the outset, with her bitching about the B & B’s decor, not to mention her smug assertion that she’d managed to make a vampire/werewolf/ghost household last for decades while Annie had barely managed a few years. And it was a brilliant, laugh-out-loud moment, in keeping with the show’s traditions, that the one snipe Annie just couldn’t take was when Pearl criticised her tea-making skills!

Good though Kari was, Louis Mahoney as Leo was again the best of the new crew. He was both funny and heartbreaking as the dying werewolf, with his assertion that he once saw Louis Armstrong – “though it could have been Shirley Bassey. I was really drunk” – and his obvious tenderness for his supernatural companions. I must say though, after this and his turn in Doctor Who episode Blink, I do wish someone would give this talented actor something more to do than dying emotively in bed.

All that said, the ultimate resolution to his and Pearl’s plot was a little predictable; they’d always loved each other, and having worked this out at the end of his life, could both move on through their doors, together. It was sweet, but signposted as soon as Leo sent Tom off to buy that mysterious ring.

In the same way that Hal is very different from Mitchell, Tom is clearly nothing like George, and again that’s a good thing. Theirs is obviously going to be a fractious relationship, nothing like the best mates that Mitchell and George were from the very beginning of the series, which is perfectly in keeping with their wounded and mistrustful natures. Hal may be best friends with another werewolf, but he still can’t touch Tom without interposing a handkerchief between their hands; and Tom never even came to trust Mitchell, so as far as he’s concerned, all vampires are still the enemy.

This all came to a head as Hal, alone and upset, tried to fall off the wagon by feeding off the nasty pawn shop owner. As he and Tom pointed a shotgun and a stake at each other, it was down to Annie to make an uneasy peace, and set the scene for that final shot of all three of them on the sofa, uneasy allies but housemates at least.

Ah, Annie. As the last one standing of the lineup that fans came to love, Lenora Critchlow has a heavy load to bear this series. On the evidence of this episode, she’s more than up to the task. Although an ensemble piece, Annie really dominated the action, with her usual mix of comedy and pathos. She got all the best laughs, from her mothering of Tom – “no stakes in my shrubbery!” – to her cobbled together ‘ceremony’ in an attempt to heal Leo, in which she randomly spouted every bit of Latin gobbledegook she could remember – “carpe diem, veni, vidi, vici, Dolce, Gabbana…”

But she also got some of the best moments of pathos. Hal saw straight through her cheery exterior – “Your mask. It’s almost as good as mine.” Then there were her tears as she tried to stop Tom and Hal killing each other. She’s lost her two best friends, and despite her cheeriness, is far from dealing with it well. She’s the same old Annie, but there’s something sadly ironic that out of the three housemates who started, it’s only the dead one who’s still around.

So, the new lineup is complete. They’re not mates yet, not like the old gang; Tom is very much like a teenage son to Annie, who’s also relishing being mum to Eve. Tom and Hal seem to have reached an uneasy peace, but I’m sure it’ll take a while before they even trust each other. Still, for all the show’s ever growing mythos and Big Plots, it feels like we’re back to its original format – three supernatural beings sharing a house, trying to deal with their own monstrous natures and ‘ be human’. In a way, the character change could even be a good thing; it felt, last year, like they’d gone as far as they could with Mitchell and perhaps George too. This way, we have a new gang to deal with the same problems in different ways. However much you loved the original cast, that’s got to be a good thing – and on the strength of this episode, for me, it is.

Being Human: Series 4, Episode 1–Eve of the War

“I don’t know what I’m for any more.”

Changing the lead cast of an established, popular TV series is always a risky business. Look at what happened with The X Files after the departure of David Duchovny, or The Dukes of Hazzard’s one, disastrous season without John Schneider and Tom Wopat. On the other hand, done well, it can be no handicap; MASH survived the loss of Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson and Larry Linville, and Doctor Who and James Bond change their lead actors on a regular basis.

The cast changes for BBC3’s Being Human have been well-publicised – a mistake in my opinion, but a logical approach in these days of internet rumour, gossip and spoilers. From being a cultish, word of mouth modest success for a lesser BBC channel, Being Human has become a massive, popular hit with an international following, so any developments are going to be big news. It was well-known that Aidan Turner, tortured vampire hero Mitchell, wouldn’t be returning, as he’s busy with The Hobbit. As the final episode of the last series saw him turning to dust after a mercy staking by best friend George, the show’s fans were already uneasy at dealing with the loss of, arguably, the most popular character in the show.

But the show was never just about Mitchell, and even then I thought that its talented creator Toby Whithouse could work around the loss of one of the original three lead characters. However, we then learned that Russell Tovey, as werewolf George, was off too, albeit with a brief reappearance. And it was announced that Sinead Keenan, whose role as George’s girlfriend Nina had been rather divisive for the show’s fans, wasn’t coming back at all.

With that leaving ghostly Annie as the only original character standing, I must admit even I was starting to think that the show might have had its day. But I’m a great admirer of Toby Whithouse’s writing, so I was prepared to give the new-look Being Human a try. I wanted to be convinced. And after one episode, I have to say that I’m not, yet. But I’m not unconvinced either.

Because far from being a slam bang introduction to the new setup, this first episode of series 4 was actually something of a slow burner. There was plenty of action, true; but by the end of the story, newly introduced vampire Hal hadn’t even got to Barry, let alone met his soon-to-be housemates. It was fairly obvious that we’d be seeing more of last year’s newly introduced werewolf Tom, and he was very much in evidence, but firstly we had to deal with what had happened since we last saw our heroes, declaring to vampire Old One Wyndham that he’d got a fight on his hands.

In a typically tricksy move, Whithouse opened the episode unexpectedly in a flash forward to a nightmare 2037, with vampires overrunning the planet. This was visualised economically by director Philip John, with a few exterior shots of burning London leading to a sequence in an underground Resistance HQ, where crucifix laden freedom fighters were listening to the fall of New York via shortwave radio. As their unseen operative was overpowered, his voice was replaced by a sneering, English-accented vampire declaring, “the Earth belongs to the vampires.” – a near quote from the very end of the first disc of Jeff Wayne’s musical War of the Worlds. The one called, like this episode, “Eve of the War”.

Of course, that clever title was more than a reference to a cult 1978 rock album; as the episode progressed, it became clear that the young woman leading the Resistance was actually George and Nina’s grown up daughter, named Eve by George with his dying breath.

Ah, George. That’s where I thought it was perhaps unwise to let it be commonly known before the series started that Russell Tovey was leaving. As a result, it was fairly obvious that it would be early on in the series, an impression reinforced by his placement right at the back of the much circulated publicity shot of the cast this year. This meant that his eventual, heroic demise in this episode came as no particular surprise, whereas if we hadn’t known Tovey was leaving it might have been a genuine shock.

George, it transpired, had been busy between series. He’d killed Wyndham (I’m guessing because of more casting problems; a shame, because Lee Ingleby’s sneering, arrogant Old One had looked like a promising new villain). In retaliation, the vampires had killed his beloved Nina, beating her to death with baseball bats. While this set George up nicely to be the traumatised, grief-wracked hermit we saw here, it was again a little too obvious a result of casting problems. Again, had we not known Sinead Keenan was leaving the show, this could have come as an unexpected shock.

Still, not everyone is as familiar as me with the difficulties of cast retention in a long running TV show, or necessarily pays attention to the behind-the-scenes gossip on the likes of Digital Spy. It’s fair to say that, without that insider knowledge, these revelations would work pretty well, and anyone who’d managed to avoid the backstage gossip must have had a very different experience to me.

This episode was less concerned with getting the new ensemble together post-haste than establishing the plot threads for this year. Recurring flash forwards to 2037 established that George and Nina’s daughter has a Big Destiny in the coming fight; meanwhile, a nest of vampires in Barry were preparing for the arrival of the Old Ones, who promised to bring an old-fashioned conquest of fire and the sword to our shores.

We were introduced to Wyndham’s ‘replacement’, Griffin, another Old One who was placed high in the local police force. Alex Jennings did well as the character, a vampire very much in the traditional mould with typical arrogance and contempt for humanity (and werewolves). But I must say, the character came across as little more than a thin shadow of previous vampire baddies, Herrick in particular; and I wasn’t altogether heartbroken at his fairly quick demise. If the show’s going to continue, it shouldn’t be repeating itself.

Much more interesting was the hip, modern vampire Cutler, who I suspect is going to be the real main baddie this series. Cutler was disdainful of the Old Ones archaic plans for conquest – “The humans would soon have an army raised. On Twitter.” Instead, he proposed an alternative that seemed scarily realistic in these days of manufactured media scapegoats like, say, disabled people on benefits. Give the vampire a new context, was his proposition, by showing humanity something even scarier.

It soon became clear that the “even scarier” something was going to be werewolves, as Cutler used his mobile phone to film the transformations of the trapped George and Tom. Andrew Gower as Cutler is a very different vampire from the likes of Herrick, Wyndham or Griffin, and this storyline looks like it could be interesting.

With all this going on, our new vampire ‘good guy’ had to be established too. So we also intercut with new boy Hal, introduced in a barber shop getting a haircut from his aging werewolf flatmate Leo. It was great to see venerable old Louis Mahoney as Leo; many of us geeks remember him well from classic Doctor Who, not to mention a heart wrenching guest spot in 2007’s Blink. Leo made the point that it must be impossible to cut Superman’s hair, presumably an allusion to similar problems with vampires; principally, that they can’t be seen in mirrors, as we were amusingly shown. But this did make me think – how, then, do they shave? We know they grow stubble, Mitchell was scarcely without it. Perhaps Hal, at least, can get Leo to shave him…

Damien Molony, as Hal, is physically a little too similar to Mitchell for my liking – as I said, change should be more than repetition. But the character is already nicely distinct from Mitchell’s hedonistic indulgence / tortured self-loathing persona. Hal is assured, quiet, and apparently far, far older than Mitchell was. There are hints that he could be much, much more violent too, and only his friendship with Leo had been holding him back.

It seemed a little contrived that Southend played host to another vampire/werewolf/ghost household, as we were introduced to Hal and Leo’s other flatmate, the ghostly Pearl. But that aside, their relationship was well-realised and (presumably intentionally) reminded me nostalgically of what Being Human was like when it started. The trouble with that, though, is that it made me reflect on how much more enjoyable it was before the encroachment of Big Storylines about Conflicting Supernatural Forces that Control the Destiny of the World. Not that this isn’t well enough done; but there are already plenty of shows doing that. The original appeal of Being Human was in placing supernatural beings in the most ordinary of settings. Get them caught up in a battle for mankind’s destiny, and you’re in more familiar – and less interesting – territory.

Still, Whithouse threw us some fun, interesting guest characters as if to make up for this familiarity. Darren Evans was a standout as motormouth vampire thrall and eternal loser Dewi; effortlessly funny and sympathetic, I was glad to see him spared staking by the episode’s end. Maybe we’ll see him again, but it seems unlikely that he’ll have much of a part to play in this year’s Big Story.

Unlike the ubiquitous Mark Williams, who played an integral part as ‘vampire recorder’ Regus. It was a nicely comical turn with moments of gravitas and drama; pretty much what you’d expect from the actor who played Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. Regus was instrumental in avoiding Griffin’s intended sacrifice of baby Eve, playing for time with some amusing business about rituals, robes and incantations (which were a random jumble of commonly known Latin phrases). All because he’d discovered, via a parchment of human skin complete with nipples, that Eve had a part to play in a Big Prophecy. Nicely enough done, but wasn’t that the plot behind about half of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Regus managed to stave off Eve’s execution long enough for George to force a halfway house of his usual transformation, which was obviously not going to end well. He killed most of the vampires (though noticeably not Cutler), but he was obviously not coming back from this mangled form. So we got a not entirely unexpected touching death scene. As George died, his ghost appeared – together with his door to the afterlife – and he bade farewell, off to join his beloved Nina. Sadly, this was less moving than Mitchell’s death last year; partly, as I say, because it was half expected, but also because it seemed a little contrived. If George was so motivated to protect his daughter and continue the war against the vampires, it seems unlikely that he’d so willingly go to his death, even if it was to be with Nina. He had far too much unfinished business on Earth for that to be entirely believable.

With all this going on, Annie hadn’t a great deal to do this week – a shame, as her understated niceness and hinted-at power were always at least as interesting as Mitchell and George’s self-flagellation. Nonetheless, Lenora Critchlow was as good as ever, and those hints about her power and destiny were still coming. As usual, she was a mixture of understated scattiness and real humanity. She was distraught at her failure to keep Eve out of the hands of the vampires, but had also come up with an amusing term for her teleportation power – doing a Rentaghost.

“That’s just stupid,” commented genuinely nasty vampire cop Fergus when he suddenly, startlingly revealed that he could see her. Yes, it is, and that’s sort of the point; of all the characters, Annie is the one who’s managed to retain the most of her human ordinariness, in spite of everything. She’s also, now, the show’s only constant, its only link to what it was. I don’t envy Lenora Critchlow the task of being longtime fans’ only anchor to the show they’d come to love.

Overall then, a pretty packed episode that nonetheless did little to establish the show’s new status quo. That’s maybe as it should be; a new status quo perhaps shouldn’t be set up too quickly for a show as established as this. It felt transitional rather than satisfying in itself, and set up a wealth of new storylines. We already knew we liked Tom (and it’s nice to see Michael Socha get a regular cult TV role to compete with his lookalike sister Lauren from Misfits). Hal looks to be interesting, and I’m glad we’ve got a new take on the vampires’ plans for world domination.

But as the episode ended with future Eve arranging her own death, then stepping through her door with the announcement that she was heading off to the past to “kill that baby” and prevent the nightmare from happening, we added time paradoxes to an already complicated mythology. With our glimpse at Hal, Leo and Pearl’s household, I found myself longing somewhat for the days when Being Human was a simpler series, without the Buffy-style mythos. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this and will continue to watch, but I’ve yet to be convinced that the show hasn’t drifted too far from the concept I originally came to love.

Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall

“You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.” – from the journals of Dr John H Watson, MD, The Final Problem

It’s a well-known story. Arthur Conan Doyle, fed up of the public’s insatiable demand for his creation Sherlock Holmes, wrote a story in which he determinedly killed off his hero. Heroically plunging from Austria’s Reichenbach Falls in a death struggle with his arch nemesis Professor James Moriarty, Holmes was no more. Or so it seemed until, bowing once again to his readership’s demands, Doyle revealed that Holmes had survived his certain death after all, and gone underground to protect his friends.

That’s such a good story, in fact, that it was basically the plot of the entire last season of Doctor Who. But last night’s Sherlock saw Steven Moffat and co returning to the source. I must admit, I had slight misgivings when I saw that scripting duties had fallen to Steve Thompson rather than Gatiss or Moffat himself, as I’d thought his middle contribution to the previous series – The Blind Banker – was a bit of a weak link in an otherwise strong chain. Not that it was in any way bad (although the stereotyping of the Chinese seemed a little 19th century), but it was surrounded by two almost perfect stories from Moffat and Gatiss. Knowing that this year’s season finale was very probably going to feature Sherlock’s apparent death, I wasn’t too sure that Thompson was the right guy to write such an important story.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The Reichenbach Fall has its flaws as a story, and I’ll come on to those, but no more so than either of the previous two. It plays with the expectations of Holmes aficionados far less than recent episodes, taking the bare bones of Doyle’s The Final Problem – a duel between Holmes and Moriarty, culminating in their apparent deaths – and dispensing with the rest to come up with a twisty turny tale all of its own. And in the process, it rather cleverly plays with our expectations not of Holmes the 19th century character, but of Sherlock the now established 21st century hero.

Presumably thinking the audience would be aware of the story’s ultimate end, Thompson actually opened with a scene of a tearful John talking to his therapist about the death of his ‘best friend’ Sherlock Holmes. So expectations were set from the very beginning, but in fact this pre-credits revelation was easily forgotten in the tempestuous story that then unfolded.

In a “Three Months Earlier” timeframe, we were shown a montage of Sherlock solving various crimes, including the theft of the painting ‘The Falls at Reichenbach’ (the only nod to the story’s original setting). But as Holmes began to attract more and more press attention (much to John’s concern), it was as ‘The Reichenbach Hero’ that he was labelled. John, much to his annoyance, simply attracted the label “confirmed bachelor” (“What are they trying to say?!”), in yet another reference to the perception that he and Sherlock could be a couple.

Intercut with all this was a sequence of Moriarty setting up, then executing, a fiendish plan to simultaneously break into Pentonville Prison, the Bank of England, and the Tower of London, where he sat draped in the Crown Jewels until the police turned up to arrest him. Cleverly scored with Rossini’s ‘The Thieving Magpie’, this was a well-put together sequence from frequent Doctor Who director Toby Haynes, who kept up the series’ standard of visual excellence extremely well throughout.

From then on, it was a battle of wits between Sherlock and Jim Moriarty, as Jim used Sherlock’s new press fame in an attempt to discredit and utterly destroy him, while Sherlock tried, seemingly in vain, to keep up and finally nail the villain who sat at the middle of his spiderweb of crime. The resemblance to last year’s finale The Great Game was a little bit of a flaw, but this was anything but formulaic. Perhaps as a result of the Holmes/Moriarty dynamic, the idea of a battle of wits between hero and villain is now de rigeur in crime drama, and when done well – as it was here – it never fails to entertain me.

Far more so than The Great Game (where he only appeared for a few minutes at the very end), Moriarty was given centre stage here along with Sherlock, and Andrew Scott again showed how much fun this new version of Sherlock’s nemesis can be. By turns camp, playful, and utterly, dangerously insane, Jim Moriarty was plainly every bit Sherlock’s equal. And again in keeping with the established idea of the hero/nemesis dynamic, he was presented as Sherlock’s dark mirror equivalent. In the splendid scene when Jim visited Sherlock at 221B Baker Street – another pinch from the original story – Jim even stated this outright: “We’re just alike, you and I.”

That was hammered home by the fact that both viewed their battle as an intellectual game, while John and Lestrade were there, appalled, to remind them that there were real lives at stake here. But you got the impression that Sherlock cared about these just as little as Jim – chillingly demonstrated by Sherlock’s declaration that, “I might be on the side of the angels, but I’m definitely not one of them.”

Jim utilising his tame tabloid hack (The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson) to demolish Sherlock’s reputation felt oddly timely in the light of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards. As Sherlock was suspected of kidnapping, pursued by the police, and finally confronted by Jim in the alias of ‘Richard Brook’, an actor supposedly hired by Sherlock himself to be an arch nemesis, this had the potential to really screw with the audience’s heads as they reflected that everything they’d seen since the show began might be false.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that clever gambit worked as well as it might have. Like John, we never doubted Sherlock for a moment. Still, even if it didn’t hoodwink the audience, it served its purpose in deceiving the characters in the show – except, of course, John, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade. And so, with nowhere left to go, Sherlock turned to his poor admirer Molly at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, only to find himself in a final confrontation with Jim Moriarty atop its windswept roof.

This was an electric scene, brilliantly played by Scott and Cumberbatch, as each tried to gain the intellectual upper hand in their game. Jim revealed that his supposed ‘unlock anything’ phone app never really existed, and that his plan was for the demoralised Sherlock to kill himself. If he didn’t, assassins were primed to shoot his only friends, John, Lestrade and Mrs Hudson. Sherlock countered with the knowledge that Jim must be able to call them off if necessary. Then Jim made the ultimate endgame move – as the only way to ensure Sherlock’s suicide was for him to die too, he promptly shot himself.

That was a bit of a shocker, but the scene had increasingly and convincingly revealed the extent of Jim’s insanity. You really believed that he would go so far as to die just to win his intellectual pissing contest with Sherlock. And it looked like he had won; with nothing else left to do, Sherlock confessed to John that he really was a fraud before quite graphically throwing himself from the roof and landing in an all too convincing bloody heap on the pavement.

Even more so than in The Final Problem, this made Sherlock’s death seem a certainty. After all, we’d been shown him stepping off the edge, then shown his bloodied body on the pavement, attended by John who surely couldn’t have misidentified him. And yet the final scene, as a tearful John and Mrs Hudson paid their respects at his graveside, showed him to be very much alive, standing silent and unseen nearby. Rule number one – Moffat lies.

I’m still not sure if this was the right way to play it. Surely it would have been a better cliffhanger if, as in the original story, we thought he really was dead, and hoped against hope that there’d be some way out of it. But on the other hand, I can see why the showrunners might not have wanted to end the series on such a down note. What it does do, though, is leave us with an intellectual cliffhanger – how on earth did he do that?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve seen plenty of internet theories already. Some have speculated on the hallucinogenic drugs from last week’s episode, which seems unlikely – Sherlock would presumably have had to drug all the witnesses. Still, with it taking a gaseous form, not impossible. Another theory is that the ‘help’ he wanted from Molly was to procure a lookalike body from the hospital morgue in just this eventuality; or that there was already a Moriarty-created lookalike – remember the little girl kidnap victim who screamed on seeing Sherlock at the hospital?

My theory is that it has something to do with the mannequin we already saw at Sherlock’s flat, as he tried to solve a century-old crime. Holmes fans may remember that, in his ‘return from the grave’ story The Adventure of the Empty House, he tricked would-be assassins with a mannequin replica of himself strategically placed in the window of his flat. Given the show’s frequent nods to the source material, my money’s on some variant of this. As Steven Moffat has now confirmed via Twitter that there will be a third series, we shall find out – let’s hope it takes less than eighteen months this time!

Moffat also used Twitter to indicate that there would be “two nods to the past” in this episode. Not sure exactly what he meant, as the show is always chock full of references to Doyle’s original stories. But my guess would be, firstly, the return of that hat, given as a jokey present by the police to Sherlock.

I love what they’ve done with the convention of the character wearing a deerstalker. Doyle’s stories never reference this kind of hat; it was popularised firstly by some of Sidney Paget’s illustrations, then by Basil Rathbone’s screen version. And yet the popular perception has become that this is the kind of hat that Holmes always wears. As John amusingly puts it, “that’s no longer a deerstalker. That’s a Sherlock Holmes hat” – which, as the owner of several deerstalkers, I can confirm is exactly what people think. That Sherlock actively hates the hat makes this even funnier.

The other major reference to Doyle must be the appearance, finally, of Mycroft’s beloved Diogenes Club, a refuge for “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town”, where speech is strictly forbidden except in one reserved area. Knowing the rule as I did, it was hugely funny to see John trying exasperatedly to get a response from the increasingly appalled looking club members, until finally some stewards hauled him off to the visitors room to meet Mycroft. Latterday literature has recast the Diogenes Club as the public front for shadowy British intelligence agencies – given Mark Gatiss’ portrayal of Mycroft as having fingers in every government pie, that seems equally believable here. I wonder if we’ll see more of it next series?

But the final word on this gripping finale must belong to the portrayals of the main characters. As Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch has been, if anything, even better than he was last year. With the final plot twist that he’ll sacrifice his reputation and even (seemingly) his life to help his friends, this story shows the culmination of an arc of ‘humanisation’ of the Asperger’s-like Sherlock this year. In A Scandal in Belgravia, we saw him exhibit real (if deeply repressed) feelings for Irene Adler, and having to make an awkward, forced apology to poor Molly. By The Hounds of Baskerville, shaken by his experience with the terror-inducing drug, he offers a no less awkward, but voluntary and heartfelt, apology to John. And in The Reichenbach Fall, we see a hero who acknowledges that he loves and needs his few friends – enough to, in effect, destroy himself for them.

And Martin Freeman has stepped up his already likeable performance as John to reflect this. The constant in-jokes about whether he and Sherlock are in a relationship now seem to have a real purpose; because, despite the fact that John is entirely straight, they plainly are. It’s an indication of this series’ fluid approach to love and sexuality that John, while not gay, is genuinely in love with his best friend, to the extent of his heartrending tears in the opening and closing scenes of this episode. A ‘bromance’ indeed, and pretty similar to the highly infrequent displays of emotion from Holmes in the original stories.

This has been a triumphant second series for Sherlock, and any doubts I had about Steve Thompson’s ability to satisfyingly conclude it have been washed away. Each of the stories has been great in its own, uniquely distinct, way, and if anything, the quality has topped the first acclaimed series. Along the way, we’ve seen some thrills, some humour, some brain taxing plots and even some controversy. But I’ve enjoyed it hugely, and if a limit of three episodes per series, produced over a very long period of time, is what it takes to maintain this standard, then so be it. However long it takes, this viewer – and, I suspect, millions of others – will be back.

Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville

“Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” – from the journals of Dr John H Watson, MD, The Hound of the Baskervilles

In some ways more enjoyable than last week’s very good effort, Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle’s best known Sherlock Holmes story is, if you’re a fan of the original, one of the cleverest bits of writing I’ve seen in terms of subverting expectations. But more than that, it stood up as a damn good Gothic thriller in its own right. Like last week, it cunningly played with the knowledge of Holmes fans without alienating the casual viewer: either way, even if you knew the story, this was a twisty turny bit of writing that had you never knowing what to expect.

Just as last week’s story showcased Steven Moffat’s preoccupations – sexy femmes fatale and plenty of intrigue – this week’s was in many ways a perfect exhibit of what we’ve come to expect from Mark Gatiss. From the outset, as a terrified little boy on the moors morphed into an equally terrified Russell Tovey in a darkened hollow, it was clear that we were in Gothic Horror territory. As indeed we should be. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories often have their roots in the atmosphere of 19th century penny dreadfuls, which is exactly what we’re used to getting from Mark Gatiss in The League of Gentlemen.

Steeped in atmosphere it certainly was, but adapting The Hound of the Baskervilles is, in many ways, a more difficult task than last week’s free flowing expansion of a pretty short story. For a start, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a full length novel, so adapting it to a new format doesn’t leave the adapter a lot of room for change. It’s also had probably more previous adaptations than any other Holmes tale, so there’s the problem of familiarity as well. And perhaps most significantly of all, if you’re to follow the original book faithfully, Holmes himself is actually absent for about half of it.

Thankfully, neither of the creators of the new Sherlock have felt themselves bound by the need for ‘faithful’ adaptation – and in the process have actually managed to produce stories that are arguably more faithful to Doyle’s in spirit than some that follow his narratives exactly. Gatiss takes the basics of the tale, and discards what is no longer useful or relevant. In the process, though, he keeps plenty of material just to throw the Holmes aficionados off the track.

In this case, that was most noticeable in the names of the characters, though not so much in their basic relationships to each other. Baskerville Hall became the Baskerville Research Centre, a Porton Down style establishment so inescapably reminiscent of similar ones in early 70s Doctor Who that I kept expecting Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to pop round the corner. Shorn of his surname, Sir Henry Baskerville had his title moved to the end of his name to become Henry Knight – do you see? Elsewhere, shifty servants the Barrymores had their names transplanted to the Major in charge of the Research Centre, while Dr Mortimer remained as Henry’s faithful physician – but in keeping with the spirit of the times, she was now his therapist. And last but definitely not least, cantankerous neighbour Mr Frankland became Dr Frankland, a perhaps too-friendly scientist.

But before we got into the story proper, the game of sly Holmes references was very much afoot from the outset. Sherlock was seen to burst into his flat covered in blood, carrying a blooded harpoon – only to exclaim – “well, that was tedious!”, showcasing Benedict Cumberbatch’s actually rather adept comic timing. This is, of course, a reference to the solution of The Adventure of Black Peter, in which Holmes tests his theory of a harpoon being the murder weapon by repeatedly hurling it into the corpse of a pig.

Having solved that one, he was bored, and as in the original stories, when he’s bored, he falls back on his addiction. Perhaps more harmful than his original fixation with cocaine, the new Sherlock wants cigarettes – as cocaine was perhaps even more socially acceptable in the late 19th century than tobacco is now, that makes perfect sense. And as a smoker who can’t light up in the house while watching it, I found his demented search for his ‘emergency supply’ both funny and cringeworthy. But lest we miss the reference to his cocaine habit, he wondered about trying something “7% stronger” – like the 7% solution of cocaine he used to inject in the original stories.

This was fun for the Holmes enthusiast and funny for the casual viewer. But the story proper started as Russell Tovey burst in, looking harried and paranoid, and affecting a rather odd ‘posh’ accent that was the only negative point of his otherwise highly intense portrayal of Henry Knight. Sherlock was intrigued by his tale of “a giant hound” (the line lifted verbatim from the original, though Dr Mortimer says it there), and resolved to investigate, rather than take up the odd case of a missing luminous rabbit.

The rabbit thing was the first in a long line of playing with your expectations if you knew the original story – the hound in the original having been painted with luminous chemicals to look as frightening as possible. Obviously the rabbit was going to be connected. But as it turned out, nothing here was obvious – a welcome surprise if you thought you knew exactly what to expect.

For a start, Sherlock didn’t stay out of the action here. After a throwaway line about sending John as “his best man” (as he did in the original), he did an abrupt volte face at Henry’s rather archaic use of the word “hound” rather than “dog”, and went down to Dartmoor himself, with John in tow, for all the world like the Doctor and one of his companions.

Because Gatiss is a Doctor Who fan and writer himself, and it shows. Besides the Baskerville Centre’s obvious resemblance to things like the Inferno Project in 70s Who, the way in which Sherlock and John bluffed their way in – using Mycroft’s stolen ID – was straight out of Who, as was John’s pulling rank on that pretty young Corporal to get him to show them around. Once inside, the ranks of labs and ‘mad scientists’ also owed a fair bit to Who, though I’m sure Gatiss’ horror fixation was drawing inspiration from Frankenstein as well. And cold scientist Dr Stapleton’s answer to the question of why they were doing such weird things – “Why not?” – called to mind a similar exchange with a mad geneticist in The X Files – “Why are you doing these things?” “Because I can.”

As Sherlock and John investigated, nothing was quite as it seemed – either here or in the original story. I was expecting the usual escaped convict to show up, particularly when the barman in the pub mentioned “the prisoner”. Instead, in a laugh out loud moment, the apparent Morse signalling John spotted across the moor was actually caused by some unfortunate joggling on a headlight switch at a local dogging site. ‘Hound’, ‘dogging’ – do you see?

The usual running gag about Sherlock and John being more than friends was also much in evidence, although I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s been done to death now. Still, it was nice that they met a genuine gay couple in the wilds of Devon, in the form of pub landlord Gordon Kennedy and his mustachioed young feller (and barman). And they had a role to play too; in this version, they were the ones keeping the half-starved vicious dog roaming the moor, though they were trying to drum up tourist trade rather than commit murder. By this point, I’d been so thoroughly thrown off the track I thought I knew that I was perfectly prepared to believe them when they said they’d had it put down – a mistake, as it turned out.

Sherlock and John’s ‘bromance’ was at its best this week, as a penitent Sherlock actually found it in himself to actually apologise (sort of) for his cavalier treatment of his only friend while under the influence of terror-generating drugs. There’s been some criticism of this aspect of their relationship, with the recently coined term ‘bromance’ thrown about as an accusation, but fair’s fair – this is absolutely the way they were in Doyle’s stories. No, if I have any criticism of Gatiss here, it’s actually the one that was thrown at Moffat last week – he really doesn’t do female characters well. There were two major characters here who were women, and neither was much more than a cypher. Sasha Behar did her best as Henry’s therapist Dr Mortimer, but the character was paper thin; beyond being ‘caring’ she was only there to be the subject of another of John’s doomed flirtations. Amelia Bullmore as Dr Stapleton fared a little better, as the red herring ‘mad scientist’, but she didn’t really get much to play with either.

But mentioning Dr Stapleton brings me to the point that some Holmes purists might find hard to take – this time round, Stapleton didn’t do it. Instead, the culprit was Clive Mantle’s avuncular Dr Frankland, which I must confess I really didn’t see coming. I did twig fairly early on that the ‘terror’ of the hound was down to weapons-grade hallucinogens – Cumberbatch’s out of character twitchiness after ‘seeing’ the monster was a dead giveaway. This also led to the initially terrifying sequence of John being menaced by an unseen ‘something’ in the Baskerville lab, which in retrospect became very funny when it was shown that it was actually Sherlock putting him through the ordeal as an experiment, while casually playing growling sounds down the PA system. Much kudos to director Paul McGuigan, who pulled off some genuinely heart in mouth suspense sequences while being equally at home with the light touch required for the character comedy.

He also pulled off possibly my favourite sequence of the series so far – a perfect visualisation of Doyle’s conceit of Sherlock’s ‘memory palace’, the artificial mental construct where he files his memories and data. As we were treated to an inspired and often funny scene of Wikipedia-like info scrolling across the screen, and sometimes across Sherlock’s very face (marvellously composited), he finally put together what Henry was remembering – the words “Liberty, In”. All right, the actual solution that it was a secret project in Liberty Indiana, codenamed H.O.U.N.D., and emblazoned across Frankland’s T shirt when he murdered Henry’s father was a little (well, actually a lot) contrived. But it was a neat solution.

As was the revelation that the hallucinogen was actually in the fog at the murder scene – “it’s the scene of the crime and the murder weapon!” That’s one of the neatest ideas I’ve seen in any crime drama, up there with the murderer actually feeding her murder weapon – a leg of lamb – to the police in Tales of the Unexpected. But even after that, Gatiss pulled out a last ace – we weren’t to be cheated of a scary monster after all, as the vicious dog was still alive and roaming, and we got to see it as our drug-addled heroes did, a red-eyed CG monstrosity that was… well, fairly convincing anyway.

All that remained was for Frankland to stumble into Grimpen Mire, here reinvented as Grimpen Minefield, and never get out again. Which he duly did, with an impressively large explosion. That part was reasonably faithful to the original tale, and I’d guessed it would happen early on; but by the time it actually did, the script had played around with my expectations so much I wasn’t sure of anything any more!

This was a series at the top of its game, and – minor criticisms aside – I think I may actually have enjoyed it even more than last week’s. Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman continue to have fantastic and believable chemistry, and the direction was once again top flight. My only question would have to be, why can’t Mark Gatiss write Doctor Who episodes this good?

Next week, to judge by a chilling epilogue, Moriarty is properly back for a reckoning. We saw him released from what appeared to be some kind of psychiatric cell by who knows who (although it sounded like Mark Gatiss as Mycroft), with Sherlock’s name scratched with lunatic obsession into every surface. As Moriarty was perfectly at liberty last time we saw him, there’s plainly some backstory to be filled in here. And it’s notable that, while hallucinating, Sherlock’s ‘greatest fear’ was a vision of Moriarty. Next week may be hard to come back from. Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle managed it…

Crumbling ironwork – The Iron Lady

“All I wanted to do was make a difference in the world.”

There have been many onscreen depictions of Margaret Thatcher, both during and after her highly divisive Premiership. She’s been portrayed by satirists (Janet Brown, Jennifer Saunders), respected actresses (Lindsay Duncan, Maureen Lipman) and the just plain unlikely (John Lithgow on Saturday Night Live). All of these have tended to focus on one particular incident in her turbulent time in office – her struggle to become MP for Finchley, her conduct of the Falklands War, her relationship with Chilean dictator and all round bad guy General Pinochet. But Phyllida Lloyd’s much trumpeted new biopic The Iron Lady is the first attempt to make a comprehensive biography of this most divisive of Prime Ministers. Generally, it succeeds. But there are some massive, glaring flaws.

Margaret Thatcher is a difficult figure to approach objectively. Not for nothing have I used the word ‘divisive’ twice in the last paragraph; this is a woman whose leadership polarised political factions more than any other. To the left, she’s a catch-all demon, to be invoked as an example of everything that’s wrong with free market Conservatism. To the right, she’s the perfect angel, in her defeat of socialism, quashing of troublesome trade unions and championing of that very same free market. The truth is almost certainly more complex and nuanced than the popular perception, and it’s that truth that Abi Morgan’s screenplay tries to get at here – not the truth about Thatcher as a politician, but Thatcher the human being, Thatcher the woman, Thatcher the mother, and most of all, Thatcher the wife.

To do this, the film tries its level best to be generally apolitical, not passing any moral judgement on anything Thatcher did or didn’t do, but merely attempting to depict it without comment. But Margaret Thatcher can’t be separated from her politics – politics is what drove her, what made her the person she is or was. The trouble is, with feelings about her still very strong on both sides, it’s difficult for a film maker to produce a partisan piece; support her, and you’ll win firm condemnation from any left-leaning viewers, condemn her, and you’ll be damned as a leftist yourself. The trouble is that sidestepping the moral issues of the politics makes the movie seem in some ways rather anodyne.

I’ve generally enjoyed Abi Morgan’s work as a writer, most recently her 1950s set newsroom thriller The Hour, but in order to walk this apolitical line, the script she’s come up with here is a curious mixture of the cliched and the inspired. In keeping with the most overused of Hollywood tropes, it shows Thatcher as a woman triumphing over all the odds against her, fighting against the (male) establishment and winning. Now, no doubt there’s a fair bit of truth there. But the presentation, all sneering men against our plucky heroine, Thomas Newman’s score giving us swelling strings as Margaret triumphs yet again, recalls all the numerous Hollywoodisations of women triumphing over adversity – Silkwood, Erin Brockovich et al.

In keeping with that style, they’ve got a Proper Hollywood Star in to play Maggie – no less a luminary than Silkwood star Meryl Streep herself, in case you’ve been living in a cave and missed the insane amount of media coverage her casting has had over the last year. But while I wanted to dislike her – how dare this American try to portray our most famous post-war Prime Minister, even if I did hate her? – I have to join in the rest of the critical worship and admit that Streep simply makes the movie.

Her performance is extraordinary, and extraordinarily good. With some clever and subtle makeup, she somehow manages to pull off the tricky feat of convincingly impersonating a well-known public figure while simultaneously giving a nuanced performance. For most of the time she’s onscreen, you forget to admire this, because she so thoroughly inhabits the role, your brain never questions that what you’re actually watching is Margaret Thatcher herself. Not only that, but Streep shows us Thatcher developing over decades, from Education Secretary to Conservative leader to Prime Minister to frail old lady, and catches all the mannerisms that we, the public, always saw in her. That shrill, hectoring voice, trained downwards for authority in her run for party leader, is easy to impersonate, but not so easy to incorporate into a performance; but a real performance is what Streep pulls off, and talk of Oscars seems perfectly justified to me.

The trouble is that, while Streep towers over the rest of the movie, other aspects of casting and characterisation are less successful. There seems to be, in British drama, a standard roster of character players you’re used to seeing as Parliamentarians in this kind of thing, and they all seem to be present and correct here. Nicholas Farrell is Airey Neave, Roger Allam is Gordon Reece, Richard E Grant is Michael Heseltine, etc. For the seasoned viewer of TV satire and docudramas, the struggle was to not associate them with all the other parliamentary dramas they’d been in, and remember that they were playing real people.

And since the movie isn’t being outright political, they’re playing those real people as cyphers, two-dimensional cutouts that lack even the depth given to them at the time by Spitting Image. This is a shame; there are some good actors here who do the best with the material they’re given, but it’s telling that, some of the time, I couldn’t tell who they were meant to be until I looked at the cast list. Given the most screen time is Anthony Head, trying his best to dull down his natural smooth good looks and impersonate Geoffrey Howe. He does pretty well, but his attempt to imitate Howe’s flat drawl comes across as rather forced, as though he’s smoked 80 Marlboro a day then taken a dose of Mogadon.

That the movie chooses to avoid politics by sidelining figures like these is actually a shame, because anyone who lived through those years knows that the British politics of the 70s and 80s was genuinely colourful and dramatic. In the days before spin, before focus groups and the domination of PR companies, politicians seemed like real, often wildly eccentric personalities. The movie catches a little of that, in a couple of montages that show the House of Commons to be a kind of shrieking Bedlam (accurate enough), but reduces some real, flamboyant figures to little more than extras. Grant’s Heseltine, for example, is barely seen, even when he stabbed Thatcher in the back to challenge her leadership; Ted Heath, portrayed rather colourlessly by John Sessions, only gets one scene before he is deposed (offscreen) by Maggie and her scheming cohorts. The few occasions which do show Thatcher sparring with her opposition in the House give a little glimpse of how well this could have been done, with Streep electric in catching her subject’s vehement, strident certainty. But even here, her main opponent is Michael Foot (a convincingly scruffy portrayal from Michael Pennington), though her most fondly remembered scraps of the 80s came with Labour leader Neil Kinnock, not even shown here.

Of course, like her or loathe her, everyone has their favourite Thatcher moment, and it would be impossible for the movie to please everyone on that score without being longer than The Godfather. But for the sake of the drama, it seems odd that some moments have been left out – most notably, Thatcher’s own ultimate downfall could have been neatly counterpointed by details of how she inflicted an identical betrayal on Heath, heightening the sense of hubris when she is ultimately deposed in the same way. Instead, we get an almost disturbingly messianic sequence in which, composed apart from a glistening tear, she exits 10 Downing Street along a bed of rose petals to the accompaniment of a mournful operatic aria.

This kind of virtual deification is disturbing, and recurs at key moments in her career, most notably her ascension to Prime Minister. Streep delivers the “where there is despair, may we bring hope” speech well – perhaps better than the real thing – but for a movie that tries to avoid being partisan, it’s difficult to rein in the triumphalism that’s so key to ‘women triumphing over adversity’ movies. The main side effect of which is that, in portraying her as the conquering heroine, the script seems to implicitly side with her politically. It’s hard to admire her as a person without admiring her politics, and oft times, the movie seems to do that.

As it progresses then, we get a potted history of her political career, which tells us little we didn’t already know. We see her intransigent stand against the trade unions, but with little conveyance of the consequences it had; the miners’ strike is glossed over in a couple of minutes. We see her agonising over the deaths in the Falklands (though, significantly, not the Argentinian ones). And we see her shaken by terrorism, as she is (implausibly) the first one to the scene when Airey Neave is blown up by a car bomb, then victim herself in an effective recreation of the Brighton hotel bombing. All of this is well enough done, but has an almost ‘tickbox’ approach. The scene late in her Premiership in which we see her ruthlessly bullying her Cabinet at a meeting is brilliantly done by Streep et al, but is nonetheless nothing more than a convenient dramatic shorthand to emphasise her ego and hubris, which made her downfall inevitable. Done better, this could have been almost Shakespearean; as it is, it just seems workmanlike.

But even if the movie seems (to me) to fail by divorcing Thatcher from the politics that were so much an integral part of her, it does rather well on its own terms, at portraying her as a flawed human being in her relationships with her family. This is best shown by the framing narrative which actually takes up about half the film; Margaret as she is now, a doddering frail old lady, guarded by machine gun wielding policemen who keep her a virtual prisoner, and most notably haunted by the shade of her beloved Denis, dead eight years previously. As Denis, Jim Broadbent is reliably brilliant, making him loveable in a way that he actually really did seem at the time. Broadbent has two tasks here. In the flashbacks, he’s the real Denis, curmudgeonly, irascible, but part of a loving relationship in which the participants endearingly refer to each other as “M.T.” and “D.T.”. In the present day, he’s a hallucination of the increasingly frail Margaret, prone to sharp observations that logically must have come from deep within her own fragmented mind.

This framing narrative is where the movie works best, though as a consequence, it’s quite uncomfortable to watch. The ageing make up on Streep is thoroughly convincing, as is her body language as she shambles, lonely, through her dimly lit flat. Since by this point you’ve virtually come to believe that she really is Thatcher, it’s hard to watch the indignity to which she’s come. Which isn’t entirely helped by the presence of Olivia Colman as her frequently visiting daughter Carol. Colman, a skilled actress does pretty well, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the glaringly obvious false nose she had to wear – evidently all the good makeup had been saved for Streep.

But these scenes do work extremely well, though I can see why some real life acquaintances of Thatcher find them in poor taste, particularly while she’s still alive. Interestingly, the other really effective sequences are the flashbacks to Margaret’s early years, in which we see her enthusiasm for politics fired up by her small business owning father, and falls in love with an improbably pretty young Denis. For all the praise that’s been heaped on Streep, it’s fair to note that Alexandra Roach also makes a real impression as the young Maggie; Harry Lloyd effectively twinkles as the young Denis, though he’s a little distractingly good looking.

It’s a telling point that the screenplay works best at being apolitical in these sequences particularly; it’s a tightrope it can’t quite walk depicting her actual time in office. As a director Phyllida Lloyd teases out some great performances, and also has the occasional flash of visual brilliance. In particular, there are some very effective overhead shots; of Margaret, the only flash of colour in a crush of black-clad MPs, or of Margaret surrounded by a crush of the admiring press at her ascension to PM, who gradually fall back from her as if in worship. But Lloyd is a little hamstrung by the movie’s low budget. It really needs a sense of scale to match the real life events, but this can only be provided by the insertion of grainy contemporary news footage, stretched to fill the widescreen image so that people in it look oddly wide. This is generally jarring, and actually has the effect of highlighting the lack of budget, making the viewer even more conscious that the filmmakers couldn’t afford to restage these events in the manner of movies like, say, Gandhi (and that’s a comparison I never thought I’d be making).

The Iron Lady is, at best, a deeply flawed film which can’t quite find an identity. But it is very watchable, if only for Streep’s magnetic performance. And it might be interesting to find out the reaction from people who have little knowledge of the real events portrayed – mostly more than 20 years in the past now – who would be able to take the movie on its own terms rather than as a recreation of times they actually lived through. It comes across as a TV movie writ large, elevated beyond BBC4 by the casting of an international superstar and little else. Not that that’s any reason to condemn it, and as an attempt at a proper biography it works pretty well. But I do wonder whether, with a perspective of distance, later films about Thatcher might be able to come up with a better judgement of her leadership than simply her triumph over adversity as an undeniably formidable woman.

Shocked by Sherlock? – The problems with diversity on TV.

As hypothesised in my review of Monday’s Sherlock, the pre-watershed broadcast of (discreetly shot) nudity (only Irene Adler’s, I note, not Sherlock’s) has got certain people all hot under the collar. Well, the Daily Mail, inevitably. Indeed, so eager were they to condemn this filth being available to those children still up at 8.10pm, they printed the above picture of it for children to see at any time of the day, alongside their usual sidebar parade of bikini-clad celebs cavorting on the beach.

It is debatable whether a show where one of the central characters is a paid dominatrix who uses her sexuality as a weapon in her games is acceptable pre-watershed viewing. But I stick to my guns of saying that it walked a thin line without falling off; think of all the pre-watershed crime dramas in which prostitution is a key part of the plot. It used to be almost a weekly occurrence in The Bill, back when that was a half hour show on at 8pm. Not to mention the downright dirty jokes in sitcoms and sketch shows as far back as the 70s – did anybody really not get the double entendres about Mrs Slocombe’s pussy in Are You Being Served?

Nor is (I’ll repeat, discreetly shot) nudity anything new in pre-watershed programming. I don’t recall any storms of protest over pre-9pm broadcasts of Carry On Camping, which contains that scene of a young Barbara Windsor accidentally losing her bra. And oddly, less discreetly shot male nudity seems to go without comment on many occasions – what about that bit in Doctor Who episode Love and Monsters where man-hungry mum Jackie Tyler contrives to get Marc Warren’s shirt off?

No, the Mail’s usual hysteria didn’t strike me as anything to worry about. But as a bit of a lefty liberal, what did concern me was a couple of articles condemning Steven Moffat’s portrayal of Irene Adler as demeaning to women, and a retrograde step from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original character. Both Jane Clare Jones’ piece in The Guardian and its presumable inspiration on the Another Angry Woman blog maintain that the final few minutes of the show undercut a previously good portrait of a strong female character, by having her machinations revealed to have been planned by Moriarty (a man), then falling for Sherlock despite having previously claimed to be gay, and finally and most ignominiously of all, having to be rescued from peril by Holmes himself. Both argue that this reduces the ‘strong woman’ status of a character who, in Doyle’s original, needed no help from a man.

It’s certainly a reading you can make. And I can understand all sorts of objections to that final flashback, which tonally did reduce a previously cerebral drama to the level of Boys’ Own heroism (and yes, I did choose that particular comic as an example intentionally). However, it has provoked the same heated online debates as so many feminist articles in The Guardian – it’s anti-men, it’s humourless, it’s just a TV show etc. I must admit, this was my first reaction on reading the original blog post, but then I realised it was a topic worth thinking more seriously about. And to give her credit, blogger Stavvers posted a well-reasoned follow-up in light of the controversy, making a good argument for the need for diversity in mainstream TV. But in defence of Steven Moffat, I’d like to add my two cents worth as to why I didn’t – quite – see it this way.

Firstly, it must be remembered that the original Irene Adler only appeared in one, pretty short, Holmes story – A Scandal in Bohemia – and that Arthur Conan Doyle was, at the time, writing basically pulp literature for those with short attention spans (one reason I’ve always found it so accessible, I guess). As such, detail on Irene’s character, her personality and her past is necessarily sparse, and much of the popular perception of her is based on the reams of theses and fan fictions produced by scholars and fans of the Holmes canon.

Yes, in the incident with Holmes she is a strong female character, who achieves everything she does independently, without male help. And yet, how do we, the readers, know that she’s always been this independent? Doyle provides no definitive answer either way. Like so much perceived prejudice on TV, our perception of Moffat’s version of Irene depends on preconceptions we ourselves have developed before watching; I really don’t think we can categorically say that Doyle’s character was definitively a more independent woman than Moffat’s.

The nudity in that scene where Irene first meets Sherlock has been seen as exploitative, too, but I took it to be rather cleverer than that. Most obviously, she’s done her research on Sherlock, and knows how much he can deduce about a person from their clothing. Her nudity is a deliberate attempt to prevent that – as shown by his visualised inability to work out anything about her from her initial appearance. But it does go deeper than that. This Irene, extrapolating from what we know of Doyle’s original, is empowered enough to use her sexuality as a weapon. And while John is most obviously discomfited by this, it’s worth remembering that Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Sherlock is cleverly poised between genuinely asexual and deeply repressed. I don’t think he would have been entirely immune.

Which also has a bearing on another big objection both Stavvers and Jones have to this portrayal. It can seem as though Irene (who has stated that she’s gay) has overcome her sexuality to fall for Sherlock because he’s just so great, while he, conversely, is free of such ‘feminine’ things as emotions, and therefore superior to her.

Again, though, I disagree on almost every count. Sherlock is portrayed, both in the writing and the performance, as deeply emotionally repressed – but that doesn’t mean he’s without emotions (or superior for that matter – in this regard, John comes off as the better human being). The whole point of the relationship is that, yes, she does have feelings for him, feelings she can’t admit – and so does he. Cumberbatch’s performance sold that to me totally, and I’m surprised anyone missed it.

As to Irene’s apparent disregard of her sexuality, it should be noted that the context of her statement about being gay is very significant. It comes just after she’s been taunting John about the homoerotic undercurrents in his relationship with Sherlock, and he’s exasperatedly exclaimed, “I am not gay!”, with hints that this is just denial. When she follows it up with, “I am.”, I took that as yet another dig at him and his apparent denial, as we’d already seen that Irene’s sexuality was rather more fluid than that from her ‘clients’. And speaking as a man who is – mostly – gay, I always prefer my TV characters to be sexually fluid rather than rigidly pigeonholed by attraction to one gender or the other; that was one reason I found the portrayal of Captain Jack Harkness in the recent Torchwood so disappointing, as he’d gone from being ‘omnisexual’ to just plain gay. That, to me, felt like more of a retrograde step than this portrayal of Irene Adler. And there, I’m willing to admit, is a view shaped by my preconceptions…

That last flashback, though, in which Sherlock rescues a prone Irene from decapitation-hungry terrorists, is harder to defend. Aside from lowering the tone of the drama rather (not that this bothered me particularly at the time), you can see how Irene ends up as the traditional damsel in distress, dependent on the hero for rescue – very much the antithesis of how the character is usually seen.

The problem here is one that I know has offended Holmes purists as well as feminists – Irene doesn’t win, as she did in the original story. As a Holmes fan, I wasn’t sure I liked that either. But if the final story in this three part series is indeed based on Doyle’s The Final Problem, we’re going to see a cliffhanger which looks like Moriarty has beaten Sherlock – or at the very least ended up with a no-score draw, as both characters are seen to die. I don’t think the series is established enough yet to start showing Sherlock as so fallible at he loses more than he wins in one year. That’s not sexist, it’s just the nature of a show which depends on having a (nearly) infallible hero.

But speaking of Moriarty, what of the claim that his assistance renders Irene’s independence as a woman invalid? That’s an interesting one, precisely because I originally wondered whether, in this new ‘reinvention’, Moriarty would be ‘reinvented’ as a woman. There’s precedent for that kind of thing – Blake’s 7’s ubervillain Servalan was originally conceived as a man, apparently, but the casting of the majestic Jacqueline Pearce in the role gave the narrative a whole new dynamic.

With that in mind, I’d thought that a female Moriarty (the Imelda Marcos of crime?) would be an interesting idea. But I can see precisely why Moffat didn’t do it – because, as a Holmes fan, he wanted to feature Irene Adler as ‘the woman’. So we’ve ended up with a male Moriarty, although I wonder whether, given his level of camp, he’s actually gay. More likely, as a counterpoint to Sherlock, he’s similarly ascetic, I suppose. But I didn’t get the impression that he’d masterminded Irene’s scheme. Again, quite the reverse – he was willing to postpone killing Sherlock and John when he had the chance, simply to allow Irene to use them as tools in her game. That’s how I saw it, anyway.

As Stavvers notes, Doyle’s Irene does what she does to ensure the security of a good marriage, but that’s the social context of the period in which the story was written. Fair enough, but what about the context of this time period? Have we reached a stage where mainstream TV diversity is so guaranteed that it’s irrelevant, plotwise, what gender/sexuality/ethnicity a character is and how independent they are? Both Stavvers and Jones maintain that we haven’t, and further that Steven Moffat is a serial offender in negative portrayals of women as weak and dependent on men.

I find the second point hard to accept about the man who created Lynda Day in Press Gang and River Song in Doctor Who. In fact, I tend to find River Song annoying precisely because she eclipses the (male) main character so much of the time. And Coupling, which Stavvers condemns as “heteronormative” and “binary-obsessed”, was surely a typical situation comedy, not seeking to broaden horizons but merely to entertain in a mainstream way. Besides, from what I’ve seen of it, both genders come off equally unfavourably.

But the argument that we still haven’t reached a point where diversity is the norm is harder to refute. Many moons ago, Star Trek sought to redress a criticism that its ‘inclusive’ universe didn’t include any LGBT characters, with the awful Next Generation episode The Outcast. This totally fudged the issue in two ways. Firstly, by evading the actual subject, introducing an asexual species for whom any sexuality was a thoughtcrime. Secondly, and more significantly, by making it an issue at all. In a truly inclusive future, it simply wouldn’t be a big deal, which Star Trek later did right in a throwaway line in Deep Space Nine. Confronted by a ‘reincarnation’ of a former lover, now female like herself, Jadzia Dax is torn over whether to rekindle their relationship. But it’s not a gender issue; rather, it’s a cultural one relating to her race. As far as same-sex relationships go, the rest of the crew just shrug and wonder why she isn’t just getting on with it.

That’s the right way to handle it, as soap operas are slowly realising with some believable storylines in shows like EastEnders and Hollyoaks. But there are still plenty of plotlines revolving around homosexuality as an issue in itself. Regardless of Harvey Fierstein’s one-time assertion that any visibility is better than none, I’d rather see LGBT people not ghettoised on TV as they were in the 70s, when John Inman and Larry Grayson were everyone’s TV shorthand for homosexuality.

Of course, Russell T Davies made giant strides here, first with the breakout success of Queer as Folk, then with the “just like anyone else” gay characters in Doctor Who. For which he was, of course, accused of having a “gay agenda”. Again, this is an issue depending on the preconceptions of the viewer, and this viewer saw it as a positive step that, in the Whoniverse, gayness was just accepted (except in the historical context where it wouldn’t have been, in stories set in the past, but even this is generally handled well). For my money, Moffat’s run on the show has continued this trend, with characters like the “thin, fat, married, gay Anglican Marines” in A Good Man Goes to War, and the Doctor’s general acceptance of every kind of relationship – as exemplified by his kissing James Corden to distract him in Closing Time.

In terms of diversity, though, some insightful bloggers like Jennie Rigg have noted a tendency, particularly over the last couple of years, for non-white characters to be treated as cannon-fodder – in Star Trek terms, disposable red shirts. Having watched the show recently, I can see this point, though it’s worth pointing out the flipside of this. Basically, there are now so many characters with no script-specified ethnicity – as it should be – that many of them, including the more numerous background characters, are non-white. The flipside of this, of course, is that non-recurring characters in Doctor Who have a tendency – even under Steve Moffat – to die.

I’d argue that the reason it might seem like Who has a racist agenda in this regard is actually as a result of increased inclusiveness in its casting. This is, after all, the show whose reintroduction featured its white heroine in a relationship with a black man, something some more conservative territories found hard to stomach. True, she did almost immediately run off with a dour Northerner, but Mickey Smith went on to show himself as one of the strongest characters in the show, as did, later, Martha Jones. That’s a non-white, female character saving the world when the Doctor can’t, right there. And it didn’t even seem like an issue, because that’s one thing Who tends to get right.

One that did stand out this year – and this was remarked on – was the death of Muslim character Rita (Amara Karan) in Toby Whithouse episode The God Complex. But here again, this was the most positive portrayal, without being overly earnest, of a Muslim I’ve seen on TV recently. And in that episode, every – human – character died, white or not, leaving the only survivor of the episode David Walliams’ weaselly alien Gibbis – was the episode anti-human?

No, I think Doctor Who’s got it about right, in terms of the balance between ethnic diversity in major, minor, regular and non-regular characters. But having done that, it’s churlish to complain of perceived racism if some of them get killed in a show which, let’s face it, has a lot of death in it. After all, how many white people got killed in the show the last few years. Come to that, how many non-humans? There’s only one ethnic boundary left to conquer – the first black Doctor. How about the brilliant Daniel Kaluuya? Or perhaps a female Doctor, as we know from Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife that Time Lords can change gender when regenerating. If we’re concerning ourselves with diversity, it’s interesting to ask yourself which of those – if either – you’d find harder to deal with. (Clue – it should be neither of them.)

This has ended up being a longer ramble than I originally intended, and the fact that there is so much to say on the subject shows, in my mind, that there are still are problems with diversity on television. But I think we’ve made bigger steps than Stavvers or Jane Claire Jones think. Again, this is a result of my preconceptions, but I’ve tried to examine them and think it through, something I’m not sure those with less reflective agendas have. There are often hints that some commentators believe writers should be issued with an equality checklist for every character like the ones you get on job applications, to ensure that each TV drama/comedy contains the requisite proportion of demographics, and that none are portrayed in any way negatively. But on television, as in life, positive discrimination is still discrimination, and reaching a decent balance needs to be achieved some other way than by militancy.

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name…” – Dr John H Watson MD, A Scandal in Bohemia

In the Sherlock Holmes canon, there are only two adversaries who, despite only appearing in one short story each, loom larger than any others. Steven Moffat’s surprise hit modernisation of Holmes dealt with the first, and most obvious of them last year – James Moriarty, reinvented from a professor of mathematics with a dilettante interest in crime to a fully fledged ‘consulting criminal’, the logical opposite of Holmes himself. The other we finally caught up with this week, in the first, hotly anticipated episode after a long eighteen month break.

Irene Adler looms very large in the Holmes mythos, despite appearing in only one story – A Scandal in Bohemia, from which this episode drew its title and the first half of its plot. She’s far from the only female villain Holmes encounters, but she holds a unique position, unrivalled even by Moriarty, of being the only one of his foes to have actually beaten him. Holmes fans ascribe all sorts of interpretations to her relationship with the generally ascetic, asexual hero – the most common being that there was the merest frisson of a potential romance between them. Which makes sense – Sherlock may be distinctly lacking in carnal lusts, but what does turn him on is an intelligence equal to his own. Steven Moffat’s clever script for this first episode draws on all of that, cleverly playing with the expectations of Holmes aficionados while still telling a story that is perfectly accessible to those without encyclopaedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle’s back catalogue.

First though, he had to get our two heroes out of the cliffhanger ending he’d left them in all those months ago. I must say that, in the event, this seemed something of an anticlimax. If you recall, Holmes and Watson had been lured to a deserted swimming pool by Moriarty, at last revealed, who had hidden snipers trained on them while Sherlock decided that the best way out was to kill them all by shooting at, and detonating, the bomb which had until then been strapped round Watson. Got that?

Flashing forward to the now, we saw our heroes saved by a last minute phone call to Moriarty, heralded by his improbable ringtone of the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin Alive’. For reasons that at first seemed unclear, this made him change his mind about killing Sherlock and John. This seemed like a copout, but as ever, the ending of the story made me reappraise this – when we saw the other end of the phone call, with a woman’s red painted nails ending the call, it was clear that this was Irene. And Moriarty’s change of heart, in light of what came later, actually made perfect sense.

Andrew Scott was as much fun as last series as Moriarty, playfully camp and humorous – the ‘awkward’ interplay of him excusing himself to answer the phone with Sherlock was hysterically funny. But as last year, he showed how he could change on a sixpence to being genuinely terrifying, as he capriciously switched to rage with his unknown caller. Moriarty’s role as puppetmaster meant that he was ‘present’ throughout, despite barely appearing onscreen, and I doubt we’ve seen the last of him for this year.

But on to Irene Adler. Given her reputation, it’s a demanding role; she has to be fiercely intelligent, calculating, and yet with a hidden depth of romance that she may not even be admitting to herself. Step up then, Lara Pulver, last seen battling enemy agents with her immaculately coiffured hair in the final series of Spooks. Given a very well-written role in Steven Moffat’s script, she seemed well up to the challenge. This new, modern Irene tempted her subjects to compromising, blackmail-prone photos as a high class dominatrix, simply known as ‘The Woman’, and there were less than subtle hints that she genuinely enjoyed her work.

This seemed like strong stuff for a pre-watershed show, and in fact I found myself wondering whether the 8.10 broadcast had originally been envisioned to go out after 9pm. But I think the show sailed just the right side of the line; any younger viewers watching a show like this can’t be entirely unaware of, ahem, ‘unusual’ sexual peccadilloes.

Which is just as well, as the new, modern Irene first presented herself to Holmes and Watson completely naked (albeit discreetly shot so no naughty bits were seen). Lara Pulver made her every bit as charming, glamorous and confident as she should have been, and her byplay with Holmes throughout was a joy.

Good as he had been last time, this was a new level of challenge for Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, and he rose to it admirably. It’s not difficult for an actor playing Holmes to convey icy intellectual aloofness; it’s far harder to deal with the implied feelings for Irene, feelings he too can’t really admit to himself. Cumberbatch added another layer to his performance here, not just in his deeply repressed feelings for Irene, but also his very real attachment to his friends. As we saw, when Mrs Hudson (the sublime Una Stubbs) was threatened by heavies, he got pretty angry – angry enough to throw the offending heavy out of the window. Several times. With hilarious consequences.

Not to say that the humour of the last series was absent in its portrayal of Sherlock though. Cumberbatch continues to make a good team with Martin Freeman as John Watson, and they have excellent comic timing. And the running gag of them being more than friends was still in evidence, as John’s latest disposable girlfriend told him he really was a great boyfriend – to Sherlock anyway. By the time Irene herself was dropping hints, he was exasperated enough to exclaim, “if there’s anyone out there who still cares, I am not gay!”

The plot was a typically labyrinthine Moffat puzzle, the first half faithfully adapting the original Scandal in Bohemia in a tale of Irene having hired Moriarty to help her in a twisty turny endeavour of blackmailing the British government over a shady intelligence plan. Complex it was, but as the pieces fell into place, it was clear that it hung together rather better than Moffat’s similarly convoluted plot for last year’s Doctor Who.

Along the way, the script was littered with Moffat’s trademark quickfire comic dialogue, delivered with precision by all concerned. Series co-creator Mark Gatiss popped up again as Sherlock’s shady spook brother Mycroft, and again, their interplay was both comic and revealing as the script dropped subtle hints about how bizarre it must have been growing up in the Holmes household. Sherlock, for his part, was again a semi-autistic ‘high functioning sociopath’, as he failed to recognise coroner Molly’s affection for him, embarrassing her in front of the guests at his Christmas gathering, and turned up, unconcerned and unclothed, for a consultation at Buckingham Palace (on a side note, I’d never realised what a nice body Benedict Cumberbatch has…)

While not alienating non-Holmes aficionados, the script was still littered with sly references to classic Arthur Conan Doyle stories and Holmes tropes in general, and I’m sure I didn’t pick them all up in one viewing. John’s blog continues to be the modern equivalent of his published accounts in the original stories, and there was much fun to be had with the titles he gave to the parade of cases they saw before they became entangled with Irene. Hence, a case involving comic book nerds became ‘the Geek Interpreter’ (referencing the Doyle story The Greek Interpreter), a mysterious dead woman became ‘The Speckled Blonde’ (The Speckled Band), and in perhaps the most side-splittingly contrived example, a strange belly button related case became ‘The Navel Treatment’ (The Naval Treaty).

Elsewhere, as John’s blog spread Sherlock’s fame, he was forced to disguise himself from the press by grabbing a handy nearby hat – a deerstalker, of course. I also liked the sly reference to John’s increasingly long list of disposable girlfriends – a nod, presumably, to Doyle’s inconsistent, cavalier treatment of Watson’s love life, in which girlfriends and even a wife were casually forgotten and not mentioned again.

Of course, the question for Holmes fans was whether Moffat would want to redress the balance by having Sherlock beat Irene this time. After it became clear that the original Scandal in Bohemia story had been dealt with about halfway in, the script cleverly played with our expectations here as first one, then the other seemed to gain the upper hand, in the game they played that obviously delighted them both. Right up to the very end, I thought that the script had let Irene win after all – then Sherlock pulled out his last ace, having scientifically deduced that she really did have feelings for him in order to finally work out the lock code for the cameraphone that was this modern version’s interpretation of the original’s photographs.

I’m forced to admit, that final solution did seem a little forced; I’ve never seen a phone that declares “I’M ____ LOCKED”, which was the only way to add the final touch of the code being “SHER” – still, I’m no smartphone expert, so maybe there is one. On a less technical side, it was a little obvious after the first try that Sherlock would have several goes at working out the code, and be successful on his last chance; but that didn’t really detract from the satisfaction of seeing it happen.

The totally hip, up to date stuff – like smartphones – was as inventive as ever, with clever visual representations of text messages, blog writing, and Sherlock’s effortless ‘decoding’ of Irene’s mysterious email. It’s been a consistently appealing trademark of this modernisation that it paints Sherlock as being a man who – like the original – makes use of every cutting edge resource available to him. I suppose the one worry is that in being so up to the minute culturally, it might not age well. Still, that’s a pretty small niggle.

As the story came to a close, the script again played games with our expectations of whether this most worthy of Sherlock’s adversaries might survive to come back another day. She gets away with it in Doyle’s original story, but despite occasional references is never seen again. Here, we were (perhaps) hoodwinked by Mycroft’s revelation to John that she’d been beheaded by vengeance-hungry terrorists, only to have the rug pulled out from us again by a flashback revealing that Sherlock himself had been her sabre-wielding saviour in that scenario.

At least one person I know felt that that stretched credibility too far, with Holmes becoming almost a comic book superhero figure; but it worked for me in the same way as Robert Downey’s more atypically physical portrayal in Guy Ritchie’s recent movies. Doyle’s stories make clear that, as well as being an ascetic genius, Holmes is one double-hard bastard – we just never see it, only hearing about it secondhand from Holmes himself (of course, he might be bullshitting). Still, this reader has always been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt…

All told, this was a great opener that shows the series has lost none of the verve and appeal that made it a hit last time round. The cast are as great as ever, with Cumberbatch playing a role he could have been born for, and Martin Freeman making the best use I’ve ever seen of his established ‘decent normal bloke’ persona. Lara Pulver was a welcome addition as a modernised but totally faithful Irene Adler, and the script and direction continue to sparkle in a way that, for me, works better than Moffat’s recent Doctor Whos – if anything, this works better as a ‘family show’ than Doctor Who’s current ‘children’s show’ approach. Next week, it’s Russell Tovey and Russell Tovey-lookalike Stephen Wight in a new version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Can’t wait!

Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

“Well, this is all really rather clever, isn’t it?”

Ring out the bells, it’s Christmas time – and the time for that most divisive of Doctor Who traditions, the saccharine, family-oriented Christmas special episode. Every year since the show returned, these episodes have divided the show’s dedicated fans like no other stories, with a very vocal group always, without fail, proclaiming each one as “the worst episode ever”.

But the thing about the Christmas episodes is that they’re very different beasts to the stories shown as part of the series proper. As a centrepiece of the BBC Christmas schedule since 2006, they have to appeal to a wider audience even than the extremely successful show normally manages. They can’t be steeped in continuity which would alienate casual viewers less familiar with the show’s Byzantine mythology. And as an intended piece of wholesome Christmas fare, they have to be even more family-oriented than the show usually is, and encapsulate the ‘sentimental’ feelings so closely associated with the festive season.

Whether you like or very vocally hate the Christmas episodes is very much dependent on your tolerance for these strictures. If you’re curmudgeonly enough to find all these things objectionable, then you’re going to hate the end product no matter how finely crafted. And for the last two years, there’s been the added factor of the distinctive style that Steven Moffat has brought to the show – a very children-friendly blend of fairy tale and magic (in the guise of technology) that, for some fans, represents a dumbing down of a show that used to eschew such things and praise the virtue of science over superstition.

This year’s story, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, had all these tropes in spades, and as usual, seems to have brought many a fanboy more outrage than joy this Christmas. But fanboys aren’t the Christmas episode’s intended audience; if some of them like it, well, great. But I doubt Steven Moffat’s going to lose much sleep over the ones who don’t. For this fanboy, the episode managed to – just – keep the balance of all these factors pretty much right. As a result, I found myself enjoying it, in fact more than last year’s.

One particular plus was that, unlike last year’s Dickens tribute, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe told a simple, linear story with none of the reliance on temporal paradoxes that’s been so divisive among the show’s fans. Speaking for myself, I rather enjoy this element of the show, but I do think it’s been rather overused recently, so a straightforward story was more than welcome for me.

But if that Moffat trope was conspicuously absent, there were plenty of others in evidence. Like its obvious inspiration, CS Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this was very much a children’s fairy tale, something Moffat seems to have steered the show towards in the last couple of years. All the fairy tale archetypes were there, and I have to admit, they appealed to my inner ten-year-old. There was a big old country house, a mysterious, magical ‘Caretaker’, and best of all, a portal to another world. Stories of mysterious gateways to other worlds were always a favourite of mine as a child, so it was no surprise that I enjoyed this.

Like Lewis’ novel, this took place in the early years of World War 2. Historical settings seem to work well for Christmas stories, perhaps because adults find the emotions surrounding Christmas to be steeped in nostalgia; even last year’s alien world was basically a pseudo-Victorian fantasy. World War 2 was not the nicest of historical periods, but in keeping with the general style, this focussed less on its unpleasant aspects, and more on the cosy, rose-tinted remembrance of a simpler time, with the bombing and the evacuation a perfect adventure for children.

It didn’t sidestep the nastier bits of war entirely, though, as we saw loving father Reg seemingly plummeting to his doom as the pilot of a failing bomber over the Channel. This was nicely realised, but while Alexander Armstrong was great as Reg, it was hard to escape the memory of his street-talking comedy RAF pilot in The Armstrong and Miller show!

The ‘advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ trope was much in evidence from the outset, with a typically frenetic prologue of the Doctor casually blowing up one of the standard alien ships intent on taking over the Earth. It’s a mark of how established the show now is that we take the preceding events for granted now; it’s an alien invasion, of course the Doctor’s going to beat it. The details of how are almost irrelevant – and a good thing too, as that kind of simplistic story was pretty old-hat even in the show’s ‘classic’ run.

It was an exciting sequence, full of pyrotechnics and well put together by director Farren Blackburn, who impressed me directing half of The Fades earlier this year. But it required quite a suspension of disbelief to swallow the part where the Doctor plummets into the vacuum of space, then grabs a handy spacesuit and puts it on to somehow survive re-entry and the crater-engendering impact in 1930s England. Fanboys may have been recalling a similar spacewalk in less than fondly remembered Peter Davison story Four to Doomsday; others probably just wondered how come he didn’t die. All right, there was a line that referred to the suit as an ‘impact suit’ that somehow repaired its wearer. But still, I suspect your tolerance of Moffat’s use of technology as magic will have influenced your opinion of the story even at this early stage.

If you could cope with that, though, you were likely to enjoy the magic of the story proper. After his rescue by doughty young mum Madge Arwell (the excellent Claire Skinner), the Doctor promises to return the favour; all she has to do is wish. In the event, it’s her children who do the wishing, which magically does bring him back on Christmas Eve, in time for him to act as a sort of mad uncle/Willy Wonka in ‘redecorating’ the old country house they’ve come to stay in for Christmas.

Matt Smith leaned very heavily on his comic talents as he showed them around the ‘improved’ house, which was like every child’s dream. Taps that dispense lemonade, dancing chairs, a rotating Christmas tree complete with train set – and a mysterious, very large present that turned out to be a gateway to a distant planet in the far future, where a magical (there’s that word again) forest grows natural Christmas decorations. Perfect for a Christmas outing; but as we’ve seen recently, this Doctor is all too fallible, and he hadn’t realised that spacefaring humans were about to melt down the forest for fuel with acid rain.

It was a nice touch to bring hard technology and future energy prospectors into such an overtly magical world, and an even nicer touch for fanboys that they came from Davison-era planet Androzani Major, The three technicians/soldiers were a nice comedy touch in the style of classic series writer Robert Holmes, with their amusing repartee, but it did seem odd to have cast comedian Bill Bailey and have him essentially function as the straight man of the group! Still, some amusing dialogue, with the scanners confused by woolly garments and Bailey’s look of comprehending horror when he realised Madge might just shoot them – because she was a mother looking for her children.

In fact, the whole story was very much an ode to the strength of motherhood and the bond a mother shares with her children – I wonder how much Steve Moffat’s wife (and mother to his children) Sue Vertue served as an inspiration. While the Doctor was there to explain everything, it was Madge who was the true hero, fearlessly chasing her children to an alien world, hoodwinking people from the future, and ultimately serving as the only one ‘strong’ enough to be a vessel for the souls of the sentient forest as they evacuated (like the wartime children) from the threat of imminent destruction.

Again, this was all very much steeped in fairy tale style magic, as the forest was represented by an anthropomorphised King and Queen styled as walking wooden statues. These were very nicely realised – in fact the CG was generally really good this episode – but looked to have stepped straight out of the pages of a classic storybook. As was their tower, ostensibly grown from wood, with its geodesic space/time ship at the top. Again, you had to swallow magic to swallow this, really. If the tower was grown from trees, presumably the ship was too – so how did it fly? What was its power supply? How did it access the time vortex? The trouble is, if these questions nagged at you, you probably have a problem with the Moffat style in general. Like the thwarted alien invasion, he asks his audience to take magic (ie advanced technology) on trust, with very little – or no – exposition to explain it. But to a modern child, technology and magic must seem very nearly indistinguishable from each other.

And it was no surprise – not really – that Madge’s trip through the vortex also had the side effect of rescuing her husband. As her thoughts locked onto him, and the ship became visible in a blaze of light, he flew his bomber straight into the vortex; a scene rather more poetic than the sillier spaceborne Spitfires in Victory of the Daleks, but undeniably similar. Reg’s sudden reappearance on the English lawn was a cheering moment, undercutting as it did the tearjerking scene with Madge trying to tell her children that their father was dead.

I actually found this rather predictable, unfortunately. From the moment I saw Reg’s bomber start to fail in the earlier scene, I just knew that he would be saved at the last minute. The manner of his salvation was well- worked out, but I never thought for one minute that the Christmas special would end with two heartbroken children learning of their father’s death. Not mention that in Moffat-Who, death is rarely permanent for nice characters. But while I sometimes feel that, in the series proper, this cheapens the idea of death and undercuts jeopardy, I have to say that it felt right here. And after all that emphasis on the virtues of motherhood, it was nice to see that the children needed their dad too. If anything, it was as much a celebration of family as any one member of it.

If all this doesn’t mention the Doctor too much, that’s because he was almost a McGuffin in this plot; but Matt Smith was as excellent as ever, switching in a heartbeat from slapstick comedy to emotional connection and even loneliness of his own. The final scene, with him realising that he too could cry with happiness, was rather beautiful – though I can imagine that, for some, this very much tipped the scales of saccharine too far. But it was a lovely surprise to see Amy and Rory again, and for the Doctor to finally embrace the friendship he’d been pushing away from last year. And here again, he had Madge to thank – such a good mother, she even reduced a 900 year old Time Lord to a surly teenager: “OK Mum. I’ll think about it.”

Generally then, an enjoyable Christmas special, light on the convoluted plotlines Moffat’s been so keen on, but steeped in all his other archetypes. I very much enjoyed it, even though the story felt a bit slight for all the spectacle. But as almost concentrated Moffatiness (a word I invented), I’m sure it’s going to be as love-it-or-hate-it as everything else he’s done with the show!