Reviews – Page 53 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 2

“We all ruin the lives of people we care about. It’s part of what we do.”

And another one bites the dust! In keeping with the grand Spooks tradition that any main character can be killed off at any time (not just in a dramatic season finale), tonight’s otherwise fairly routine episode was suddenly enlivened at the end by the not entirely unexpected demise of loveable tech geek Tariq.

I say not unexpected because this twist was telegraphed so heavily, the only way it could have been more obvious would have been if Tariq had spent the episode wearing a T-shirt saying ‘dead soon’. Firstly, we had Sasha and his FSB pal Anatoly horseplaying around with an umbrella. “You’re dead,” japed Sasha, “poison umbrella.” Obviously this was a callout to the infamous assassination of Georgi Markov in 1978, when Bulgarian secret police stabbed the famous dissident with a ricin pellet from an umbrella tip, while waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge.

As with the old ‘Chekhov’s gun’ rule – if you show a gun in the first act of your play, someone will have been shot with it by the final act – this was a pretty obvious bit of foreshadowing. The only question was, who would be the victim? Step up Tariq, ‘unusually’ thrust into the limelight rather than his usual background technobabble function.

First he had a go at snide git Calum, who, let’s face it, was undoubtedly more rubbish for having a laptop full of top secret information nicked from him by mugging. Calum was mocking Tariq for his surprisingly crap file encryption (though if the encryption had been up to his usual standard, the plot couldn’t have taken place). This caused Tariq to deliver an unusually impassioned speech about how he had to work hard to get where he was, and he worked so hard because he “gave a shit”.

Not content with the usual device of building him up into a bit of a hero before killing him, the script then had him commit the fatal error of trying to bury the hatchet with a bit of socialising. As he turned down Calum’s offer of a pint with a promise that they would have one “soon”, he basically put himself in the place of every soldier in a war movie who tells his pal they’ll get together soon, just after this last assault on The Bridge at Remagen. And thus, his fate was sealed. As soon as the power went off just after his mysterious revelation on the CCTV footage, you knew he’d be dead in minutes; it was thus no surprise when a passer by ‘accidentally’ bumped into him and he discovered a spreading lump on his stomach just before he lurched out of his taxi to die outside Thames House.

However well signposted, it’s still a bit of a wrench to see Tariq go. Shazad Latif did a surprisingly good job of making him as likeable as previous Section D tech bod Malcolm – thus far the only member of the team who’s managed to retire without dying, going mad or being sent into exile. But this was clearly one of those episodes about The Harsh Realities of the Job, and presumably Tariq knew what he was getting into when he saw the list of previous casualties from the Grid – not least Colin, a previous tech support bod whose first venture into the field resulted in him being hanged by terrorist fanatics. Tariq will be missed, not least because it’s now clear that the unlikeable Calum was pre-emptively brought in to replace him.

Also learning about The Harsh Realities of the Job this week was the impossibly glamourous Erin – something of a surprise, as her previous role as stand-in for Harry rather implied she was a seasoned veteran. As the mysterious leaks from the stolen laptop spread across the internet, it became clear that one of her assets, an analyst at a Russian oil firm called Martha Ford, was about to be compromised. Trying her best to be ruthless like Harry, Erin commanded Martha to extract all the files relating to this year’s baddie Ilya Gavrik before getting the hell out of there, all the while reassuring her that the stolen laptop didn’t include her details, really it didn’t.

Martha thus dutifully downloaded all the files onto the usual conveniently hi tech USB stick before running (well, walking briskly) like hell out of the oil firm’s offices, which were the usual modernist hi tech building of big glass walls favoured by every corporation in the Spooks world. Imagine then her surprise as she saw a giant TV monitor at reception outing her as a spy, which somehow nobody else in the building was paying attention to.

Clearly Martha’s cover was blown, and Erin secreted her in one of MI5’s inappropriately named safe houses (these things are usually as safe as a swimming pool full of sharks and razor wire in Spooks-world). Cue much crying as Martha realised that ‘Karen’, as Erin was known to her, had lied to her all along and cared little about her safety beyond her usefulness. This caused Erin to get teary as well, though at no point did it – or anything else – cause any disturbance to her immaculately coiffured hair.

Grappling with her conscience, Erin reported to Harry, who thankfully doesn’t have that much hair to be worried about. Harry then dutifully gave her one of his trademark speeches about The Harsh Realities of the Job: “First, we have to be prepared to give everything. Second, and far harder, we have to be prepared to ask others to give everything.” Erin bit her lip and accepted that these were indeed The Harsh Realities of the Job, which thus far haven’t impacted on her responsibilities as an impossibly glamourous single mum juggling the defence of the realm with childcare and haircare. Surely it can only be a matter of time, as families are always an obvious weak point for the agents of Section D.

Families were also much on the minds of Harry and Ruth, as this week’s runaround involving intel details leaked to the internet from a stolen laptop intersected with this season’s Big Plot. Not only was Russian minister Gavrik involved in the oddly named oil firm ‘KaspGaz’ (some reference to Garry Kasparov perhaps?) in which Martha was embedded, it seems that the laptop was stolen by somebody involved in the Big Plot and then leaked to a former Spook with a grudge. Said ex-Spook made the foolish mistake of staring straight into the nicked laptop’s webcam as Tariq pulled off his final feat of techno-magic – turning on the webcam after having failed to track IP addresses and email links seems so obvious you wonder why they didn’t try it first. The laptop duly recovered, Harry is now curious about the link.

He’s also still curious about who’s reactivated his former asset and lover Elena Gavrik. In order to seek more information, he flipped open his book of Cold War cliches and arranged to meet her at a ballet rehearsal. This had the effect of recalling all those Cold War spy thrillers which climax with backstage shenanigans during a performance of the Bolshoi (though the only one that leaps to mind is 1965 Morecambe and Wise ‘classic’ The Intelligence Men). But times have moved on and budgets are limited, so instead of the expected full auditorium watching a sumptuously mounted production of Tchaikovsky, we got a lone ballerina practising to Beethoven. The only people watching in the whole theatre were Harry and Elena, which surely made them stand out rather more than they’d like while having a clandestine meeting.

Unfortunately for them, two people did clock them, and they both work for Russian secret service the FSB. Rather more fortunately, one of them is Harry’s long lost son Sasha, who’s spent the episode trying to conceal his mum’s treachery from FSB comrade Anatoly, a man so aggressively Russian with his piercing blue eyes and bushy black goatee that he appears to be constantly auditioning for the role of Rasputin. Obviously it’s pretty impossible to explain away his mum having a secret meeting with a senior agent of MI5, so Sasha is obliged to do Anatoly in, in a fight tastefully intercut with the ballerina bouncing around to Moonlight Sonata. Having finished filling Elena – and the viewers – in on what’s going on, Harry is confronted again by Sasha, and between scenes helps to remove the body in a way that is not disclosed.

Back at the Grid, Harry has deduced that the only likely suspect to impersonate him in reactivating Elena is top level CIA spook Jim Coaver, played by William Hope who will forever be known as the ineffectual Lt Gorman out of Aliens. In the twisty turny world of Spooks, the CIA are always about as trustworthy as the Russians, so this comes as no particular surprise. Thus, Ruth is tasked with investigating Coaver while Harry meets with him in his usual unofficial office – That Bench on the Embankment that has a nice view of the Houses of Parliament. Meanwhile, we discover that Ruth has doubts – she’s not only looking into Coaver, but she’s checking up on Harry too. Nicola Walker’s pinched frown is virtually causing her face to implode with guilt – but she’s going to feel even worse when she finds out the result of having sent the hardworking Tariq home for the night.

The usual Spooks runaround then, but fun nonetheless. The stolen laptop plot felt like the sort of thing the show used to do in its sleep, but its link to the Big Plot, and the death of Tariq, give it a bit more significance than just a filler. Next week, expect accusations and guilt to fly around the Grid like paper darts made from Eyes Only files, and we’ll continue to wait with bated breath for the inevitable moment when Sasha discovers that nasty old Harry is actually his dad. My money’s on him finding out just after he’s shot Harry…

Doctor Who: Series 6, Episode 12–Closing Time

Craig: “You gave up your hours for me?”

The Doctor: “Of course. You’re my mate.”

After the admittedly satisfying big philosophical themes of the last two weeks’ episodes, it’s nice to get back to a good old-fashioned romp. Gareth Roberts’ Closing Time was unashamedly that, a runaround bit of fun, but nonetheless contained some real depth along with the adept comedy as the Doctor put a brave face on his rapidly approaching doom to engage in one last bit of “noticing” with his friend Craig. This sequel to last year’s The Lodger contained no real surprises but was satisfying nonetheless; like that episode, it was a romp that centred very much on the nature of friendship, particularly as it applies to the Doctor.

Having guilt-tripped himself into dropping off Amy and Rory last week, this was plainly a Doctor who, as he put it himself, had “been on his own for a long time”. As we later learned, he was only one day off from his ‘inevitable’ death, which means, given the ages we were told in The Impossible Astronaut, that he’s been travelling alone for about 200 years. No wonder he’s lonely! Like the Tenth Doctor’s interminable farewell tour during his regeneration, he’s decided to try a social call on old friends; thankfully without all the sturm und drang that accompanied that trip. In the case of Eleven though, it seems the closes friend he has outside of his companions is Craig Owens. Fittingly enough, as he spent a while living with Craig – we all have fond memories of flatmates we get along with.

Craig’s moved on since the Doctor last saw him though; he’s in a nice new house with Sophie and their baby Alfie (or as he prefers to be known, “Stormageddon, dark lord of all”). Sophie’s off for the weekend, leaving Craig to cope alone for the first time, which plainly fills him with ill-disguised fright. So, despite his initial reservations, a social call from the Doctor is probably the best thing that could happen to him!

Gareth Roberts is a writer who’s always had a good sense of what the show’s about, having cut his teeth writing Douglas Adams-esque novels recreating the overtly comic Tom Baker/Lalla Ward era. His tendency towards outright humour has produced the same divisions in fandom as that era did, with some complaining that his scripts are too funny and lack menace or depth. In my view, that misses the point; just because a story is humourous doesn’t exclude either of those things. Closing Time was a good case in point. It may have lacked the complex timey-wimey plotting of the series recently, or the big concepts of the last few weeks (which may be a welcome change for many in any case), but like his best episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures, it was a good straightforward adventure enlivened by some real depth of character.

This worked because there really were only about three characters in it (or four, if you count Stormageddon). As Craig, James Corden once again proved that he can be a very good comic actor, despite his often annoying comedy shows and public appearances. As with The Lodger, Craig is effectively the straight man in this odd couple, and Corden once again had fantastic chemistry with Matt Smith as a comic duo. The other major character (though she was really only a comedy cypher) was Val, but it was great to see Lynda Baron back in the show. I’ve got a feeling this may have been one of Gareth’s suggestions; not only did she sing the classic “Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon” in 1965 comedy romp The Gunfighters, she’s perhaps best remembered as the fantastically over the top Eternal pirate Captain Wrack in 1983’s Enlightenment. Not to mention her best known role, Nurse Gladys Emmanuel in Open All Hours!

Val helped catalyse many of the best comedy moments in the episode, with the running gag that she thought Craig and the Doctor were a couple, something Craig didn’t cotton on to until the very end. This wasn’t just a bit of comedy business though; it caused the Doctor to muse on the nature of his relationships with people. “Partner? Is that better than ‘companion’?” Elsewhere, the gag sprang up in other ways – most notably the Doctor’s hilarious attempt to distract Craig from the fact that they’d just teleported into a Cyber ship. “Look into my eyes Craig… It’s you, it’s always been you.” “Doctor, are you going to kiss me?” Followed by Matt Smith’s comically gruesome portrayal of how the Eleventh Doctor might try that; he’s certainly not the smooth operator that Ten was.

I can already hear certain sections of fandom begin to scream about the return of the ‘gay agenda’ to the show, but, innuendo aside, this was more of a bromance than anything else, believably showing a friendship between two men secure enough to joke about that. The sequences of the Doctor and Craig chatting in Craig’s house were the real point of the episode for me, with the bolt-on trad sci fi plot almost incidental. Who hasn’t had a heart to heart with their best mate on the sofa late at night? And, inevitably, who hasn’t then looked round to realise said best mate has fallen asleep while you were opening your heart to him? All that was missing, in my experience, was the four pack of beer on the table; and we’ve already established that this Doctor doesn’t really care for booze. The Doctor’s wry smile, and genuine fondness as he tucked Craig and Alfie into a duvet, said it all.

Matt Smith was on sensational form this week, as in fact he has been every week since the show came back for the autumn. Regardless of the quality of each episode, his performance has been consistently excellent, and for me has depths of subtlety not usually displayed by Ten (sorry, Tennant fans). In Closing Time, this was a believably resigned, weary Doctor, nonetheless prepared to put a brave face on the angst for one last run at thwarting the bad guys. Smith was able to go from the genuinely comic (his chats to Alfie, his attempt to demonstrate a remote controlled helicopter in the shop), to the heartbreakingly sad. The scene in which he unburdened his woes to Alfie, using the sonic screwdriver to project a starscape on his ceiling, was a tour de force of, effectively, solo acting. His sad resignation of his fate, while eulogising all the possibilities a normal human baby has in front of him, was one of the highlights of the episode; and certainly worlds away from Ten’s grumpy attempts to dodge what he knew was coming. And there was still comedy in that scene, easily leaped to from the pathos, as the Doctor explained that the real angst would come later, with things like mortgage payments – “save your crying for later.”

The whole business about being able to talk to the baby – something we established the Doctor can do in A Good Man Goes to War – provided many of the episode’s comedic and dramatic highlights. The Eleventh Doctor has already shown himself to often be joking, or outright lying – “Rule One. The Doctor lies.” So it’s hard to know whether the baby talking business is either or both of those. If not though, Craig may want to worry about young Alfie – if, at the age of one, he already wants to be called ‘Stormageddon’, thinks of everyone else as ‘peasants’, he may be rather a worrying personality when he gets old enough to properly articulate all of this. But of course, by the end of the episode he’s happy to be called Alfie, and proud of his dad (who’s no longer simply “not-mum”). It’s an amusing aspect of the plot that even the baby has a character arc – though Sophie seemed less than pleased that his first word was “Doctor”.

Of course, it’s a given that Doctor Who can’t just be a character drama or comedy, especially these days; there has to be a sci fi plot as well, on which the character arcs can hang. As with other character driven stories (The Lodger, School Reunion etc), this was a pretty straightforward thing that felt like something of an afterthought to drive forward the character arcs, but it was nice to see the Cybermen again. It fits with Gareth Roberts’ love of the classic show that he should bring back such an archetypal monster (not to mention the line “You’ve had this place redecorated. I don’t like it.” from both The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors). Gareth has said that, as nobody was using a classic monster this year, he felt that he might as well bring one back.

This is unlikely to be remembered as a classic Cyberman story in the vein of Tomb of the Cybermen or The Invasion, though. Fittingly for the setting in a shop, these were the bargain basement Cybermen, with a typically ill-thought through plan. So, proceed with the conversion of humanity via a department store fitting room? Yeah, that’s going to work. Thankfully the script didn’t shy away from pointing out the absurdity of this, with the Doctor explicitly telling the Cybermen that it wasn’t going to work with just six of them; shades of the post-modern moment in 1976’s Terror of the Zygons, in which the Doctor points out, tacitly, the show’s budget limitation to a would-be world conqueror: “Isn’t it a bit large for just about six of you?”

But it was nice that the show finally brought back the Cybermats, the metallic rat creatures first seen in 1967’s Tomb of the Cybermen. I was never too sure in the original series what these things were actually supposed to do; it’s only in 1975’s Revenge of the Cybermen that they actually pose any sort of threat, as they go around injecting a space station crew with poison. Here, they had another purpose; they were there to siphon off the power from the cables that Colchester council had rather ill-advisedly put so close to the buried Cyber ship. Oh, and they can attack you with their oh-so-cute little organic gnashers.

Those real, animal-like teeth were not only cute, but served to remind the viewer that Cybermen aren’t robots, they’re part organic too. This was reinforced by their attempted conversion of Craig – “your designation will be Cyber Controller”. Well, without wanting to be too cruel to James Corden, it’s fair to say that the Cyber Controller we saw in the classic series was always, how shall I put this, on the ‘chubby’ side.

Also notable was the fact that the conversion process was more like that of old, with Craig’s entire body being bolted inside Cyber armour, rather than the recent process shown of simply removing the human brain and placing it in a metallic body. I rather liked that, as I thought the brain transplantation wasn’t quite horrific enough. And it’s justifiable too, as that process was being employed by Cybermen from an alternate universe; these are the homegrown variety, refreshingly free of the Cybus Industries logo on their chest. Mind you (and I know this is a budgetary consideration), this would have been a great opportunity to redesign them; while fans are still in shock about the redesign of the Daleks, the Cybermen used to be retooled practically every time we saw them.

Also not exactly original, but entirely in keeping with the themes of the story, was the manner of their defeat, as Craig’s love for his child managed to overcome the Cyber conditioning. It was amusing to watch the Cybermen’s heads explode as they struggled to cope with the concept of parental love, but this still couldn’t disguise the fact that this was, basically, the same resolution as in 2006’s The Age of Steel. Not that this really mattered when that resolution played so well off the themes of the story – love, parental instinct, and friendship.

So, a nice, trad sci fi story, underlying a sensitive examination of the nature of friendship, with some heartfelt insights into the show’s main character. Not a demanding episode, but a fun and touching one. I never thought I’d be glad to see James Corden, but after last year’s episode, his odd couple chemistry with Matt Smith was a delight to see again. And Gareth Roberts mix of comedy and pathos was perfectly pitched. It was a good standalone story – this second half of the season has had a better track record than the first with those – that still played cleverly into the overall plot, as we saw a brief return for Amy and Rory. Having said that, I could have hoped that Amy would find success in life at something a little more substantial than modelling for perfume – and since we all now know what ‘Petrichor’ means, who’d want to smell like damp earth?

But the real meat of the plot arc business was in that (seemingly very tacked on) final scene, as we were unexpectedly shunted into the future to see Madam Kovarian confront, and recruit, River Song. Frances Barber was hamming it up like mad, which is probably the best way to deal with being in a scene with Alex Kingston, as the monsters formerly known as The Silence bolted River into the previously seen astronaut suit to wait beneath the surface of the aptly named Lake Silencio.

It’s still hard to fathom the logic of this plot – if they had River bolted into the suit as a little girl, why not use her then? Why use a late 60s vintage Earth space suit to disguise their assassin at all? And why have her pop up from the bottom of a lake to kill her target? It’s like the most contrived Bond villain scheme of all time, but we can hope that next week’s final episode might make some sense of it all. At least Madam Kovarian’s tale of River’s frequent brainwashing does explain why she doesn’t remember herself having done this in The Impossible Astronaut; though it was far from clear where in her time stream she was when bolted into the suit as opposed to standing on the shore watching herself rise from the lake. Still, that final shot of her helplessly strapped into the suit beneath the lake was a doozy, even though that (presumably Moffat-penned) children’s rhyme about the Doctor’s death seems a bit contrived to me.

Other recurring oddnesses – yet again, we had a father-son relationship crucial to the plot, with the mother all but absent. There does seem to be a recurring meme of monsters getting in through reflective surfaces, in this case the mirror in the shop’s changing room. And what was that business last week with Rory talking about himself in the past tense, and both he and Amy flinching from each other? Knowing Steven Moffat, next week may or may not resolve things, but timey-wimeyness will be central to it all. As the Doctor gathered his blue envelopes and gained a convenient Stetson from Craig, the stage was set for the death we saw at the very beginning of the series. Now let’s see how Moffat gets us out of that…

The Fades–he sees dead people

“Why do people assume death is fair? It’s totally random – just like life.”

Dead birds are falling from the skies. In the dark night streets, a woman is attacked by a weird grey skeletal figure with yellow eyes. A teenage boy awakes from nightmares of the end of the world, wetting his bed, and sees grey cadaverous shades of the dead everywhere he looks. The recently dead roam a forest, light blaring from their torsos, seeking one of the few places left to ascend since man invented concrete.

Welcome to the world of The Fades, trailered so cryptically and effectively on BBC3 recently. “That looks cool, “ I remember thinking of the hyperdramatic but undetailed trailers, set my Tivo to record it and promptly forgot it existed. Yesterday I found my recording, watched it, and realised that this has the potential to actually be rather interesting.

Much has been made of this as a new ‘cult’ youth drama, much in the vein of Misfits and actually from the same channel that produced the sleeper hit Being Human. The Fades certainly does have this kind of potential, but it’s aiming at a far younger ‘youth’ audience than either of those shows. While the heroes of Misfits are young, they’re clearly older than school age; and the vampires and werewolves of Being Human must be pushing thirty (or far older if they’re vampires, whatever age they look). By contrast, The Fades has a hero who’s still in the sixth form, presumably between 17 and 18 years of age. The result is that, with its supernatural weirdness and teenage hero, this feels like nothing so much as one of those classic spooky children’s dramas that both BBC and ITV did so well in the 70s and 80s, updated to include swearing, sex references and some genuine horror.

That post-watershed slot might sadly lose it some of the teenage viewers it might otherwise have got; but in these days of Sky Plus and iPlayer, I doubt that. The fact that what seems ostensibly like a teenage show has so much in it that could be deemed ‘adult’ is presumably down to the writer. Jack Thorne is a playwright who cut his TV writing teeth on Skins, another show that tries to show a realistic portrait of British youth, then graduated onto working with Shane Meadows on the excellent This is England 86.

Those influences show; while 80s teenage dramas were all about gritty portrayals of joblessness (hello, Tucker’s Luck), and Skins is all about hedonistic fun laced with social reality, The Fades brings precisely those approaches to a typically freaky, Children’s BBC-like tale. Nominal hero Paul (Iain de Caestecker) is a believable and likeable teenage nerd; witness his hilarious attempts to smoke in a vain attempt to impress the friend of his sister he has such an obvious crush on. Or his convincingly irritating family – his mum smirks at his frustrated assertion that he’s “trying to be a man”, and his sister (Lily Loveless, worlds away from the lesbian earth mother type she played in, yes, Skins) is a constant source of patronising embarrassment.

Again as in classic children’s spook shows, Paul is accompanied by a wisecracking best friend whose primary function is to be the comic relief. Mac (played brilliantly by Daniel Kaluuya out of, guess what, Skins) is a horror fanatic whose pop culture musings on Nightmare on Elm Street and The Sixth Sense, delivered in a marvellously deadpan way, counterpoint a real horror story happening to his best mate that he can’t even see.

As in many classic children’s spook shows, our heroes become involved while messing about. An unwilling Paul has been dragged into an abandoned underground shopping mall by Mac, desperate to find ‘”weird objects” for a horror film he wants to make. Tumbling down an unforeseen escalator, Paul finds himself in the middle of a mysterious confrontation between gun toting nutter Neil (Johnny Harris, previously terrifying as Lol’s rapey stepdad in This is England 86) and the terrifying skeletal figure we saw attacking Natalie Dormer in the pre-credits sequence. Dormer is somehow involved; her character, Sarah, is already dead by this point. But she’s got top billing, she played Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, and anyway this is the sort of show where death isn’t really a handicap to further appearances.

Like any sensible teenage nerd, Paul is terrified and runs away. But he can’t escape, as he begins to suffer the same scary dream visions Sarah used to have – visions of the end of the world, with him as a lone survivor in a corpsescape where ashes rain down thick and fast. From here it just gets madder and madder; Neil turns up unannounced in Paul’s bedroom to act as a sort of Obi Wan Kenobi mentor, as Paul begins to see the shades of the dead on street corners. Some of the dead, Neil explains, can’t ‘ascend’, and linger on Earth; this makes them act “shitty”. They disintegrate into ashes if a living person ‘passes through’ them; we see this happen as Paul stumbles through one in in an underground subway, and she crumbles into precisely the kind of ashes that have been haunting his dreams.

Paul, it seems, has some kind of ‘purpose’; perhaps he’s the Muad’Dib. Later, Neil shows him hordes of the dead trying to ascend, but it looks like Sarah’s just missed the boat. She can still talk, it seems – for now. But only Neil and Paul will be able to see her. But she’s not the one they have to worry about; that scary skeletal grey thing that killed her – and nearly sucked out Neil’s eye with its green tongue – is “something new” that has the potential to end the world. It’s already killed not just Sarah, but Neil’s other sidekick – a welcome return for This Life’s Daniela Nardini, as a pistol-packing, faith healing Scottish vicar, and I hope she’s not dead for good!

All of this is great stuff in itself, though as of part one, who knows what it can all mean? It’s reminiscent of so many classic children’s spook dramas, from King of the Castle through Moondial to Century Falls. But what makes it even better is the Skins-like sense of realism about what it’s like to be a teenager, that presumably gave it its post-watershed slot. Aside from the swearing, and sex references (when Paul starts telling Mac about his dreams, Mac automatically leaps to the conclusion that they’re of the wet variety), there is plenty of wince-making accuracy to Paul’s position as the school’s introverted nerd. “Nobody even notices us,”comments the more excitable Mac, shortly before a slightly comic bit of business ends up with them hiding in a cubicle of the girls’ toilet while a girl does her business next door. “That’s probably the most sexual thing that’s ever happened to me,” notes Mac. Elsewhere, Paul is in therapy because of his bedwetting, but is understandably unkeen to reveal what’s been happening to his therapist, and he has a massive, possibly requited crush on his sister’s best friend, much to his sister’s malicious amusement.

This blend of classy supernatural drama with teenage realism makes The Fades like the sort of drama I would have killed to have seen on Children’s BBC when I was a teenager. It’s all very well having your hero as a teenage boy but if those central teenage boy things like sexual frustration, swearing and wet dreams don’t get mentioned, how much can you truly believe in the character? This has all that in spades, plus some genuinely witty dialogue, taut direction and scary special effects. It’s only part one of the first series, so who knows how good it’ll be, but I thoroughly enjoyed this, and if there’s any justice, BBC3 will have another Being Human-style hit on its hands. Not sure yet if I’ll blog on this episode by episode, but if the next one is as good, I very probably will.

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 1

“We all have to be diplomats in the new age, Harry.”

As the ‘intelligence professionals’ of Torchwood shuffle shamefacedly off our screens, it’s time to welcome back the real pros. Yes, Spooks is back for its tenth and final (sob!) series. Often touted as the UK’s answer to 24, this is a show that started out with the intention of showing the agents of MI5 as real people, but soon realised that this was far less fun than an increasingly improbable succession of conspiracies, technobabble and illogical action shown in split screen. In other words, by now it is pretty close to 24, but has the advantage of being informed by a pseudo-John le Carre approach developed by someone who once saw an episode of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Over they years, this has made for an enjoyably bonkers show that’s never less than compellingly watchable.

Section Chief Harry Pearce is one of the reasons why the show has always been so watchable. Incarnated with pursed-lipped earnestness and a wit as dry as the Sahara by Peter Firth, he’s now the only one of the original cast left standing. Given that leaving Section D of MI5 usually results in death, madness or lifelong exile, he is perhaps wise to have stayed in his post. He has a murky Cold War past that the show has frequently delved into, but this year, fittingly, it looks like the plot is all about him. The pre-credits flashback shows us a succession of things he got up to recently as if to prove this.

As we enter the plot proper, it becomes clear that Harry has been suspended as head of Section D. The logical assumption is that this is a result of him having spent years working with Lucas North and not having figured out that he was actually another man who just happened to look like Lucas North. A bit. But no, it turns out that the powers that be are displeased that, last series, he traded the top secret Albany files for a hostage – his longtime flirtee Ruth Evershed, with whom he surely must get it on in this final series.

Standing up to enquiry chairperson Josette Simon (who enviably seems not to have aged since I last saw her in Blake’s 7 in 1981), Harry conclusively proves that his potential girlfriend is a more valuable national asset than the Albany project – true love justified in select committee. “Can I see what you wrote about me?” Ruth enquires, to which Harry growls, “Over my dead body”. Hmm. Hints about the ending, I wonder?

Nevertheless, Harry’s soon back on the Grid, and it’s time for us to see the team Section D is fielding this year. Gone from last year’s team is newbie Beth Bailey; ostensibly she’s been let go because of all those dubious connections that were somehow no problem last year, but in actuality I suspect actress Penelope Myles had other things on. Never mind, last year’s other new recruit Dimitri is still there, played as ever by that towering talent of Hollyoaks Max Brown. Tariq is still running the techie branch – I was disappointed to see that Shazad Latif has had a haircut as I loved his floppy hair – and has been joined by an intentionally irritating wanker called Calum Reed. Incarnated by Geoffrey Streatfield, Calum’s purpose is wind up everyone else. Going on a raid with Dimitri, he doesn’t have the experience to know that a conveniently left-behind laptop is probably booby-trapped; if there’s one thing we established Dimitri knows last year, it’s bombs. He may regret having pulled Calum clear of the resulting explosion. “Did you kill anyone in the SBS?” Calum later enquires. “Sometimes,” says Dimitri, looking pointedly at him. “I miss it.”

The most important newbie, however, is Lara Pulver playing tough but fair single mum Erin Watts, who apparently can’t get government childcare for her daughter and has to leave her at home with gran. Erin’s been standing in for Harry since his suspension, and if the show wasn’t ending would be the obvious candidate to replace him. In this first episode, she shows herself to be every bit as capable as Harry, chairing meetings, bollocking Calum, and infiltrating a formal dinner for a Russian minister posing as Dimitri’s date.

With this first episode setting the store for this year’s plotline, it looks like the shorter six week run will mean fewer standalone stories and more of a serial approach – hopefully one that will work better than Torchwood did. The plot seems to centre on Harry’s Cold War relationship with the wife of Russian finance Minister Gavrik, who’s over in England to cement a new ‘special relationship’ with Russia. In the usual improbable extrapolation of real world geopolitical factors common to the show, it seems that the UK is going to ditch the old relationship with the US and form a new one with Russia. A slew of topical reasons is given to justify this that, as usual, don’t really bear close scrutiny.

All of this is explained to Harry by returning Home Secretary William Towers, played as last year by the marvellous Simon Russell Beale. Whatever’s going on, Towers is mixed up in it up to his ministerial eyebrows; he smuggled Gavrik into the UK without Harry’s knowledge for the negotiations, and like everyone in the show gives the impression that he knows far more than he is saying. Given that Harry personally murdered the last Home Secretary, he should tread carefully – particularly if Harry pays him a home visit wearing his black murdering gloves.

Given that there’s a Russian minister in town, naturally someone will want to assassinate him. And so it proves. Raiding his shabby basement flat – apparently the assassin couldn’t get the usual deserted high rise office with big windows – leads our heroes to the conclusion that an attempt will be made at the formal dinner. And so in they go with dinner suits, and in Ruth’s case, a false name which lasts about five minutes until the Home Secretary turns up and recognises her. The assassin is posing as a wine waiter, but for some reason hasn’t considered the obvious tactic of poisoning the minister’s wine. No, instead, he puts everyone on alert by murdering one of the staff, then changes his clothes and walks toward the minister while pulling a gun. This not being the most covert of approaches, he is swiftly taken down by Erin with a sharp shot – oddly, he’s neglected to wear the same body armour that Dimitri discreetly has on under his dinner jacket.

Harry has other things to worry about though. Gavrik’s wife Elena (Alice Krige, an actress so prolific I’m only amazed she’s never been in the show before) used to be his best Russian asset during the Cold War. Now, it seems like someone’s pretending to be Harry to reactivate her. This bothers Harry, and his frown becomes more intense than usual – particularly when paid a visit by Elena’s son Sasha (the rather sexy Tom Weston-Jones). Sasha’s working for the FSB now, but understandably doesn’t want to tell anybody that his mum was Russia’s biggest traitor during the 80s.

It comes as no particular surprise to anyone (except perhaps Ruth) that, back in the day, Elena was more than Harry’s top asset, she was his lover – as hinted at in a series of soft focus flashbacks throughout the ep. Even more predictably, Harry’s not willing to ‘neutralise’ Sasha, because, gasp, Sasha is actually his son. Nicola Walker reacts to this with the usual subtlety with which she imbues her performance as Ruth – the mildest of facial tics on her pinched frown display the inner turmoil she’s presumably feeling.

So, business as usual for Britain’s most improbable spies, but sadly for the last time. We’re on familiar technobabble territory as Tariq traces the assassin on CCTV using ‘motion recognition’ software – apparently, “the way you walk is as unique as a fingerprint”. Harry’s grumble that Erin has undone the ten years of work he put into getting his chair just right is met with a rejoinder from Ruth about getting Q Branch on it – if only Desmond Llewellyn was still with us, it’s be great to see him fiddling around with Harry’s recliner settings. It’s all bonkers fun and comfortably familiar, and I’m looking forward to spending the next five weeks saying goodbye to a show that, despite its flaming insanity, I’ve come to love over the years.

Doctor Who: Series 6, Episode 11–The God Complex

“My name is Lucy Hayward, and I’m the last one left.”

Doctor Who does The Shining! And filtered through enough surreal images to make this episode stand far better comparison with Sapphire and Steel than Night Terrors a couple of weeks ago! It’s hardly surprising, as writer Toby Whithouse has a far more reliable track record writing Who than Mark Gatiss; his first episode was the fan-pleasing School Reunion back in 2006, and last year’s Vampires of Venice, while not quite in the same league, was still an excellent standalone episode that, like this one, didn’t ignore the fact that a larger arc was going on around it.

In between, of course, Whithouse created BBC3’s excellent Being Human, and what made The God Complex so enjoyable was the same blending of surrealism, dark humour and outright horror, with some genuine pathos thrown into the mix. And also like that show, it pitched a group of convincingly ordinary characters into an insanely weird situation, and believably showed how they might react.

The deserted hotel setting was so reminiscent of The Shining that this can’t have been a coincidence (it was noticeable that the room numbers shown in the early part of the episode kept dancing just around the novel’s iconic room number 217). But as I’ve often remarked, Doctor Who has never shied away from ‘borrowing’ well-known horror stories; The Brain of Morbius and The Pyramids of Mars show how well that can work. In keeping with the script’s debt to Kubrick, director Nick Hurran filled the episode with deliberately weird and off-kilter shots. There were reverse-zooms aplenty in the shots of the bland corridors, while the staircase was shot from above in a dizzyingly Escher like display of geometry. It has to be said, if this wasn’t shot in an actual hotel, then the studio recreation was eerily accurate in its sinister blandness. But then Kubrick’s movie too was shot in a studio recreation of a hotel so perfect that for many years I didn’t realise it wasn’t the real interior of the building shown at the movie’s opening.

The deliberately surreal things lurking in the hotel rooms, coupled with the hotel’s obviously not really being on Earth – “Look at the detail on these cheese plants!” – also called to mind the classic last Sapphire and Steel story in which the time agents are trapped in a deserted service station isolated from time. But homages aside, Whithouse has produced an excellent script that has its own distinct identity outside of its influences. Like last week’s The Girl Who Waited, the story explored some sophisticated philosophical concepts; in this case about the nature of faith, and our fears, and the difficulty of escaping from the role your own nature has provided you with.

The unnamed creature imprisoned in the hotel encapsulated all of these themes. A being whose very nature is to pose as a god and feed on faith, which also despairs of this existence but cannot escape its own nature without outside intervention, it ended up pulling off the same trick as all the best monsters from Frankenstein’s onwards – it was terrifying but also sympathetic. In classic Who style, Nick Hurran presented us mostly with glimpses of the creature in the early parts of the episode – a horn here, a claw there – before moving on to the stylish shots of it half obscured by frosted glass in the Doctor’s first meeting with it. When it was eventually revealed as being an ‘alien Minotaur’ (“I didn’t expect to be asking that question this morning”), it was great that Whithouse didn’t shy away from referencing its most obvious antecedent from an unfairly despised 1979 story – “they’re distant relatives of the Nimon”. Fitting, as the Nimon also posed as gods and lived in a building called the Power Complex.

But that weighty title cleverly referred not just to the creature, but also to the Doctor himself – “You’re trying to save us all? That’s a real god complex you’ve got there.” In a year which has seen the Eleventh Doctor’s character developing in some interesting and often sinister ways, this was a standalone episode that took the time to examine these themes in his character, acknowledging the arc that surrounded it. Obviously we were all crying out to see what lurked in the Doctor’s own personal room of fear (room 11, of course), and equally obviously nothing that could actually be shown could really live up to the concept. In the end, the story wisely didn’t show us exactly what it was; but Matt Smith’s sadly accepting smile – “Of course. What else could it be?” – together with the tolling of the Cloister Bell will almost certainly provoke a lot of fan theories. I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea was returned to later, but I actually think leaving it to the viewer’s imagination is by far the best approach.

In fact, it seemed that most of the episode was driven by this examination of who the Doctor was. It’s become a recurring trope of this incarnation that, despite his proclamations of how great he is, he’s very fallible. We saw that again here, in the well-acted awful moment of realisation when the Doctor realises the approach he’s been taking to try and protect his friends is actually placing them in even greater danger. That whole scene was a highlight of the episode, as it delved deep into all the characters left by that point; Rory has no faith to fed on, so the prison kept trying to show him ways out, but (obviously) Amy’s faith was in the Doctor himself, and the moment when she suddenly said “praise him” was a well-choreographed shock.

Ultimately, the resolution to all of this just had to be that Amy had to lose her faith in the man she’d waited all those years for as a little girl. Underscored by a particularly beautiful rendition of Murray Gold’s theme for Amy, this was an unapologetically tear jerking scene that recreated a similar moment from the end of 1989’s The Curse of Fenric (another story which centred on faith). The difference here was that, unlike Sylvester McCoy’s apparent cruelty to Ace in that story, you got the impression that the Doctor was actually, finally, telling Amy the truth. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan (and Caitlin Blackwood) played it superbly, and it felt as though, despite his frequent declarations of his own brilliance, the Doctor was having an epiphany as to his need for some humility – “I’m not a hero. I really am just a mad man with a box”.

Like John Mitchell in the most recent series of Being Human, this was a Doctor thoroughly chastened by recent events, and forced to face up to some very unpalatable truths. The final epiphany came as he realised that the dying creature’s last words – “death would be a gift for such a creature” – were actually about him. We’ve had plenty of hints over the last two years about the Doctor’s guilt and self-loathing, but it was to the forefront here. Faced with this torrent of unpleasant self-knowledge, it made perfect sense that he’d offload Amy and Rory at the end of the episode – “I’m saving you… What’s the alternative, me standing over your grave?” It was another tearjerking scene (though I question Rory’s choice of the series 2 Jaguar E-type over the far superior series1), but it didn’t feel like it really was goodbye. The Doctor said they hadn’t seen the last of him, and I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of them. Still, it was nice to finally have some acknowledgement of the story that’s dominated this year so much – “If you see my daughter, tell her to visit her old mum some time.”

However, a good horror story has to have some real scares alongside the character stuff, and like the best horror stories, the fear sprang from the characters. It was utterly believable that conspiracy-mad geek Howie’s deepest fear was being mocked by beautiful girls; I loved Dimitri Leonidas in the part, and would have liked to have seen more of him – he’s just my type. Joe’s fear of ventriloquist dummies was unsettlingly realised as a room full of them cackling at him, and Rita’s fear of failure was perfectly credible given what we knew of her background. In keeping with other nightmare archetypes, it was scarcely a surprise to see a clown, and the PE teacher ordering you to “do it in your pants” is a familiar scare for many of us!

The return of the Weeping Angels turned out to be a red herring in all sorts of ways; not only were they not real, they were, surprisingly, not a fear intended for any of the regulars. Still, it was nice to see them again, and they looked just as scary as ever. Rather less successful was the visualisation of Lucy Hayward’s ‘terrifying’ brutal gorilla. It was so unconvincing that for a moment I actually thought her greatest phobia was of a man in an ill-fitting gorilla costume. Nick Hurran wisely kept the shots of it down to mere glimpses, but even those made it look rather ropey.

In terms of the guest characters, fun though Howie, Joe and Lucy were, the episode really belonged to just two: Rita and Gibbis. Rita’s sharp intelligence was well-played by Amara Karan, to the extent that she really did seem a bit of a loss as a regular companion (“Amy, with the greatest respect… You’re fired”). And the portrayal of her Muslim faith as being just another part of a real, complex person rather than her main character trait was refreshing. Indeed, her response to the Doctor asking her if she was a Muslim – “Don’t be frightened!” – was a wittier and more pertinent bit of social and political comment than anything Russell T Davies managed in Torchwood this year.

David Walliams as Gibbis was rather harder to ‘praise’. Initially, he seemed solely there to function as comic relief. Though given some very witty lines as a member of the oft-conquered Tivoli race (“Resistance is… exhausting.”) he seemed so over the top that for a while I made the assumption that he would turn out to be the real villain. However, it’s a testament to Toby Whithouse’s skill as a writer that he turned these traits on their head when the Doctor confronted him. The Doctor’s speech made you realise that far from being comic, the Tivoli’s approach of allowing themselves to be conquered by anyone and everyone was actually a ruthlessly shrewd strategy to ensure their own survival, motivated entirely by self-interest. It made Gibbis seem more hard-edged afterward, and made you realise how ruthless he was being in his treacherous sacrifice of Howie to save his own skin.

All in all, I really enjoyed this episode, and thought it a far more effective evocation of common nightmares than Night Terrors – I’ve never had nightmares about killer peg dolls, however sinister they may look, but some of the things lurking in those hotel rooms were definitely familiar. The direction was also more effective for a horror story, and the script showed that standalone episodes can work and still acknowledge and inform the bigger story going on around them. The character examination was every bit as good as The Girl Who Waited, with the focus this time on the Doctor rather than Amy.

The one criticism I do have – and it’s a significant one – is that the ultimate explanation for the events didn’t really live up to everything we’d seen. It’s a prison, fine, but the ‘computer glitches’ that kept all the fears lurking in the rooms felt a little contrived. And maybe I missed it, but there didn’t seem to be any explanation of why the prison for an alien God-imposter would resemble a 1980s hotel in the first place. Another ‘glitch’ I suppose; but the problem here is that, really, no explanation could possibly justify the bizarre series of images and happenings portrayed in this episode. Still, this is one case where it was all done with such brio that I actually found this fairly central flaw quite forgiveable. If nothing else, it shows how contrived explanations can matter less in an otherwise well-written, well-acted and well-directed story.

Torchwood–What kind of Day has it been?

So here’s a plot synopsis for you. Death decides to give up the day job, and fairly soon, the world notices that nobody’s dying. Everyone thinks that’s pretty great. Until the hospitals start to fill up with horribly injured people who should be dead, but have to live on instead in unspeakable agony. The medical profession, horrified, must try and find some way of reversing the effect.

Sound familiar? It should, but it’s not the plot of Torchwood: Miracle Day. That’s a 2002 Twilight Zone episode called One Night at Mercy, which stars Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander as a depressed Death (“It started in about the mid-1300s. You know, the Black Plague.”) who ups and quits, and deals with how a young doctor persuades him to go back to work despite the fact that it means his own death. Now, there’s nothing wrong with re-using a good idea; Doctor Who does it all the time. But the thing about One Night at Mercy is that it covers the same premise as Miracle Day, and implicitly deals with many of the same effects that Russell T Davies seemed so interested in exploring. And it does so, with admirable economy, in 25 minutes. Russell, on the other hand, took 10 hours to do it – and that’s just the start of what was wrong with this season of Torchwood.

But to be even-handed, let’s start with the good stuff – and there was some, no matter what the internet haters think. I thought this was a pretty badly constructed drama as a whole, but it was still entertaining enough to hold my interest for ten weeks. The suspension of death is an interesting premise, even if it has been done before – and for all I know, the Twilight Zone episode is just one of many examples, it’s just the one that sprung to mind. It allowed for some enjoyably gruesome scenes, starting with the ‘live autopsy’ in part one, through the ‘head turned backwards’ CIA assassin, the wince making probing of Rex’s chest wound and the existential horror of burning people to ashes when they can’t die. Russell was plainly interested in exploring the effects of the scenario, even if only in throwaway lines about having to redefine murder. That said, I think some of his hypotheses about the Malthusian population explosion may have been a little off the mark, and I question whether infections would run rampant quite so easily – surely with the host organism unable to die, the infecting agent would eventually be defeated by the body’s immune system? Still, I’m no expert, and from what I hear, Russell did have quite a lot of advice from professional medicos in the writing process.

Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have any advice from script editors. What made Children of Earth such a taut thriller was the total lack of any extraneous material that didn’t drive the plot forward. Russell’s laudable desire to explore the various ramifications of the lack of death made for a surplus of interesting ideas chucked in as though they were meant to be major plot points, only to be abandoned by the next episode. What happened to the cult of the Soulless? That was an interesting idea, given some prominence then never mentioned again. Or the ‘45 Club’ of people jumping from 45th floors to get as near death as possible? Why did we have to spend so much time not caring about Esther’s loopy sister, when her storyline was forgotten about for many episodes then casually resolved in one shot at Esther’s funeral? OK, I know Esther’s concern for her sister is what gave away the heroes to the conspiracy, but that could have been just as easily achieved without spending so much time on her. And speaking of relatives, why introduce a dramatically portentous fraught relationship between Rex and his dad in part four and then never show or even mention him again?

Some would argue, with a little validity, that these touches gave a needed depth to the new characters, in much the way introducing Ianto’s family did in Children of Earth. But in that story, Ianto’s family turned out to have an integral role in the storyline, whereas giving so much screentime to characters who have nothing to do beyond make one appearance then be quickly forgotten about smacks of padding. As did the subplot about Tea Party politician Ellis Hartley Monroe and her campaign to segregate the ‘dead’. At least that wasn’t entirely forgotten about as the Holocaust re-enactment got underway, but it was something of a waste to introduce a character as nasty (if one-dimensional) as Monroe, then kill her off in the same episode and have her entirely forgotten about. I mean, come on – Mare Winningham is a multi-award winning actress, surely she could have been kept around as an identifiable bad guy to personify the government?

Speaking of the government, Miracle Day gave Russell an opportunity to get political again, something which, while laudable, is rarely a good idea in his case. His intentions are always good, and in the best tradition of Doctor Who’s liberal tendencies, but he’s not good at making pointed, incisive political comment in a script. Remember the promise in The End of Time that Barack Obama had ‘found a solution’ to the Recession? Well, if he’s found the ‘Start Economic Growth’ button in the White House, I’ve seen no evidence of it yet.

The trouble with starting to make specific comments about politics in a script is that it’s easy to be broadbrush and simplistic. This is by no means limited just to Russell; not everyone can write something as pointed and relevant as Drop the Dead Donkey or The Thick of It. Still, while I thought the two-tier US healthcare depiction in the overflow camps was relatively well-done, Gwen’s righteous indignation at Phicorp having ‘privatised’ UK healthcare seemed a bit too easy a target. I don’t want market forces running the NHS either, but as Richard comments on his Millennium Dome blog, plenty of countries manage to incorporate private organisations into state healthcare without becoming the cesspit of greed and self-interest represented by the US system. It’s almost as if Russell has just read in the left wing press that ‘private=bad’, a simplification every bit as moronic as the right wing press’ assertion that the heroic market forces will always save the day unless interfered with by that meddling State.

The US/UK comparison is one that did seem central to a lot of opinions of the show. There seem to have been relatively few who enjoyed it with reservations; most either loved it or hated it. Among those who hated it, one of the most common complaints was that “it isn’t really Torchwood any more”. True, the quirky Welsh setting of the original series was what differentiated it from all the other X Files wannabes out there, but Wales wasn’t forgotten about this year (even if it did have to be recreated in Los Angeles studios most of the time). The parochial Welsh dialogue and quirky Welsh minor characters were still very much in evidence – that ear for Welsh speech being one of Russell’s better contributions.

And yes, the show didn’t have many of the original Torchwood hallmarks. But let’s remember that these were pretty much all wiped out over the last two seasons anyway, so even a wholly British return would have been a very different show. Season 2 saw the end of Tosh and Owen, and Children of Earth found Ianto, the Hub and even (thankfully) the ‘Torchwoodmobile’ following them into oblivion. By the end of Children of Earth, in fact, the only hallmarks of the original show left were Captain Jack, Gwen and Rhys.

But here, the show did seem to make a real misstep. Firstly, Jack was, for most of the first two thirds of the season, very much in the background of what many see as his show. As noted on the oncoming hope blog, it wasn’t until the Jack-centric 7th episode that he came to the foreground; the rest of the time he was just a slightly more mysterious member of a not entirely successful ensemble. He was at least a little less broody than in early seasons of Torchwood (although the glee that he displayed as he suggested cutting off that living corpse’s head seemed a little uncharacteristic), and John Barrowman gave a consistently good performance. In fact, I’d say that in parts 7 and 8, he actually veered into ‘good acting’ territory rather than just, basically, playing John Barrowman. While I’ve always thought he gave a good, charismatic performance as Captain Jack, it’s rare that the part has required him to actually act very much; the death of Ianto was one such occasion, and here we saw him portraying believably deep emotion in his interactions with Angelo both in the past and present.

Having said that though, Jack seemed more like Barrowman than usual in one respect – rather than being ‘omnisexual’, he was just gay this year. True, he mentioned previous trysts with women and referred to having been a parent. But in his first depiction of onscreen steamy sex scenes (which I’m still not sure were a good idea for a character with a large following of children) were exclusively with guys, and even when flirting it was men only for him. Given his past history, I would have expected him to at least flirt with Stuart Owens’ mistress, rather than offer to “drink Appletinis and bitch about men”. It seems odd that a US network like Starz would be so unflinching in portraying homosexuality; given the lack of it on mainstream TV, it was perhaps a bit courageous of them not to try and dilute it into bisexuality. All well and good, but Jack’s meant to be bisexual!

Gwen at least was more consistent with her usual self, though even here I think her occasional unlikely transformations into some kind of action heroine were a little unconvincing. But Eve Myles did well, I thought, being given most of the lines of righteous anger and moral outrage. Some people thought that made her seem irritatingly whiny this year, but fair’s fair – she’s always been the moral conscience of the show, and it’s not something you can say has only just started. She couldn’t even have a steamy affair without constantly beating herself up about it in the first season.

And Rhys, thankfully, was still Rhys – a believable everybloke in much the same style as Doctor Who’s Rory Williams. Like Rory, lots of people seem to think Rhys is just a buffoon who allows his wife to constantly emasculate him. But I disagree; again like Rory, Rhys is the anchor to the real world for the show, a character we can see ourselves in the way that he reacts. And – again like Rory – it doesn’t stop him from being genuinely heroic. Having pretty much joined the team proper in Children of Earth, he was here to be seen helping Gwen infiltrate the overflow camps and driving a truck through a hail of bullets. All credit to Kai Owen for making this as believable as his ‘ordinary guy’ schtick when lending moral support to Gwen’s family.

The new characters, unfortunately, were not so successful. Rex was the major offender here, I’m afraid. I’ve seen Mekhi Phifer in a number of things before – Dawn of the Dead, 8 Mile etc – and he’s always been a believable, likeable onscreen presence. Perhaps it was something to do with the writing here, but he seemed to be gurning and chewing his way through a surprisingly one-dimensional portrayal of a guy who really wasn’t very likeable anyway. It didn’t help that when we first met Rex he seemed to be gloating about a colleague’s wife having cancer; and his perpetual reminders to the rest of the team of how much more professional he was than them quickly became a major irritant. If anything, he managed to beat out the season one version of Owen Harper as ‘most annoying character’. The only good thing about this was that it gave us all a chance to relish it when Jack wound him up.

By contrast, Esther was less annoying but unfortunately not remotely memorable. Her heavily signalled transition from deskbound dormouse to action hero never really materialised; in fact, my abiding memory of her as a character was the end of episode 8, as she drove an unconscious Jack away while screaming. “I don’t know what to do!” By the end, she seemed little more than a cardboard adjunct to Rex, which made it hard to care about the ‘shock’ moment when she was shot. Despite a perfectly good performance from Alexa Havins, I don’t think anyone’s going to be putting up any shrines to Esther.

The best new character was Dr Vera Juarez. Arlene Tur made her a believably harried medical professional with a conscience, and it was refreshing to see a character smoking cigarettes without being a major villain. She also managed to be believable and likeable without having to be saddled with several dead-end plots regarding her family, showing that a soap opera background for a character is not a strict necessity. This meant that it genuinely was a bit of a shock that she got burned alive in episode 5 – a twist that worked precisely because she was such a good character, but sadly means that she won’t be back if the show is – unlike Rex, unfortunately.

The other two regulars can’t really be discussed separately – they formed a good double act throughout the series that, like so many other subplots, sadly turned out to be a misdirection or a dead end. Lauren Ambrose was sensational as Jilly Kitzinger, portraying a soulless corporate shark with just the right amount of wicked glee, and with a much-commented on excess of lipstick. If the show comes back, so presumably will she – which almost makes up for not following up on the “better run faster” recurring line and letting her escape the Shanghai explosion in that seemingly tacked on coda.

Oswald Danes, on the other hand, didn’t seem quite so successful as a character. As I’ve mentioned previously, it seems bizarre to have one of your major characters be a murdering paedophile without that fact having some specific relevance to the story you’re trying to tell, but Russell managed it here. While his verbal sparring with Jilly was among the highlights of the show, his ultimate revelation as a virtual irrelevance made it hard to see the point of him. It didn’t help that Bill Pullman portrayed him in one of the most bizarre acting styles I’ve ever seen. It was all about oddly placed… pauses… and sudden DRAMATIC emphasis for no easily fathomable reason. In fact, after his appearance in episode one, I actually looked him up on Wikipedia to see if he’d had a stroke recently. But no, he’d actually made the choice that this was how Oswald should be portrayed. Memorable perhaps, but for all the wrong reasons.

Generally more successful were the roster of one-episode-only, stunt cast guest stars. John De Lancie was a highlight as CIA chief Shapiro, and Daniele Favilli was sweet and likeable as Angelo. It’s always good to see Wayne Knight too, even if for most of us he’ll be forever Dennis Nedry out of Jurassic Park. At least he was consistent; sweaty, shifty CIA mole Friedkin was almost like Nedry all over again. C Thomas Howell was so good as the Families’ sinister assassin that I’d really have liked to see more of him than just one episode, and Mare Winningham managed to extract a believably hateful Tea Partier from the rather one dimensional writing of Ellis Hartley Monroe. Ernie Hudson showed himself to be every bit as good as the other Ghostbusters in the one-scene shot as Phicorp boss Stuart Owens. The only guest star who was a bit of a let down was Nana Visitor; not through any fault of her own, but more because the script had given her no personality beyond functioning as an exposition machine.

If the characters were a bit of a mixed bag, though, the plotting was an absolute mess. The show couldn’t quite seem to decide if it wanted to be a proper serial, like Children of Earth, or an anthology show featuring stories set in a world where no-one can die. This identity crisis made for a very oddly structured story in terms of pacing and momentum, which wasn’t helped by the ‘one-big-guest-star-an-episode’ approach.

The overall plot seemed to move at a snail’s pace for about half the season, not helped by the inclusion of all the dead-end subplots and bits of interesting but irrelevant detail about the situation which kept distracting Russell as though someone had yelled “ooh, look, kittens!” Then it suddenly got moving with the Holocaust re-enactment stuff, although the team’s quest to expose it proved an irrelevance too as the exposure failed to stop it happening – meaning that Dr Vera, the most likeable new character, effectively died for nothing.

Then the plot screeched to a halt for the (admittedly excellent) ‘standalone’ episode Immortal Sins (ep7). Oddly enough, this was the episode that felt most like ‘proper’ Torchwood, with Jack’s 1920s antics being both a romp and then very dark, while Jack and Gwen’s interminable car drive/soul baring framestory recalled a very similar drive in series one episode They Keep Killing Susie. Good though it was, however, it put the brakes on the plot proper while imparting admittedly relevant background that was mostly rather tangential and could have been dealt with far more quickly in a few lines of dialogue. Alternatively, this episode might have been better placed earlier in the series before the overall plot properly gained momentum – it would have been a shame to lose such a good piece entirely. Whichever, it didn’t feel like it worked where it was.

As if to make up for the drip feed of information in the first half of the series, the final three episodes ended up being mostly a nonstop barrage of exposition, in which the plot had to keep pausing for people to explain things to each other at seemingly interminable length. The very last episode seemed to recover something more of a balance between exposition and action, but this was rather undermined by the fact that not only did it not make sense on its own terms, but that a number of the explanations given actually undermined things which had been previously established earlier in the story. A case of ‘learning’ from The X Files again, perhaps, as that show constantly shifted the goalposts of its messy conspiracy story to extend its sell by date. Torchwood had no such excuse, though – this was a story meant to have been economically told over one season.

Overall, there was a lot to like here, and it could, with some heavy script editing, have been a very thrilling, memorable show rather than one that merely entertained while causing frequent impatience. Of its many flaws, the excessive length and obvious padding were probably the worst, and its not surprising that so many internet forums have been expressing a desire to create a tighter ‘fan edit’ of about half the length that would still retain all the relevant parts of the story. The lack of consistent internal logic didn’t help either, though any show that features a drug called ‘retcon’ can presumably fall back on the option of retconning itself in any potential future series – it’ll have to, to at least explain why the Whoniverse is now saddled with the impossible-to-like Rex Matheson as another immortal being. Given Russell’s stated disinterest in doing any more Torchwood, coupled with the generally lukewarm response to this one, I’d be surprised if we did see any more of it, despite internet rumours already circulating that it’ll be back next year. If it is, though, I’ll still watch in the hope that they’ve relearnt all the lessons they seemed to have forgotten this year.

Torchwood: Miracle Day, Episode 10

The Blood Line

So, that’s that then. All those answers we’d been working towards for the past 9 episodes, in the end, boiled down to “What is it?” “I don’t know.” As our heroes finally reached the planet straddling pink lined cleft that was The Blessing (already likened elsewhere to a ‘planetary vagina’), you couldn’t help feeling a real sense of anticlimax. Not since the end of Lost have I felt an ending to be so unsatisfactory, though at least with Lost we had six years of involvement with likeable characters to sew up, making up for the lack of resolution to the actual mysteries.

Not that this should be particularly surprising. As I’ve mentioned before, Russell T Davies seems to have a real problem with writing satisfactory endings. It’s the hallmark of a writer who cut his teeth working on neverending soap operas, I suppose; he does characters, dialogue and ongoing plotting very well, but when it comes to wrapping things up, he’s more often than not written himself into a corner. Hence the frequent ‘Davies ex machina’ endings to various Doctor Who seasons, in which, basically, magic is used to extricate our heroes from the insoluble; or even the endings to both series of Queer as Folk – one ends with numerous unresolved storylines, the other with the heroes inexplicably jetting off to the US in a flying Jeep.

It’s also, perhaps, another indicator of how much this series of Torchwood has tried to be like The X Files, a series not renowned for its episodes’ satisfying resolutions. “I know it probably doesn’t have the sense of closure you’re looking for,”says a weary Dana Scully to author Jose Chung in Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’, “but it has more than some of our other cases.” Even by season 3, The X Files had established this trope well enough to be self-referentially mocking about it; Torchwood, sadly, does not have that luxury, and as a result, you’re just left gaping at the screen, saying “But… but…”

To be fair, the episode did entertain if not actually thrill. There was some good character stuff, hardly surprising in a script co-written by Russell T Davies and Jane Espenson; the subplot of Gwen making peace with her dad’s inevitable death was very sensitively handled, and a well-played scene between John Barrowman and Bill Pullman gave real insight into the characters of Captain Jack and Oswald Danes. That scene, in which Jack expressed his admiration for how magnificent humanity would become in the future then gave Oswald a Total Perspective Vortex moment by showing him how small he’d made his life, also served to defuse one of the show’s very real contradictions. If Jack is from the future, surely everything’s bound to turn out ok; after all, he’s seen it. ‘Borrowing’ from 1976 Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars, the script then has Jack explain that, “the future can be changed. It’s being written right now.” As good an explanation of the paradox as we could hope for, and certainly better than many of the other ‘explanations’ we got this week.

Indeed, nods to Doctor Who were all over the place this week. Perhaps recognising that, given Torchwood is set in the Whoniverse, fanboys would immediately rush to the internet to query how come The Blessing hasn’t intersected with all those other things we know to be lurking beneath the Earth, Russell had Captain Jack specifically mention both the Silurians and the Racnoss as he speculated on what The Blessing could be. A nice moment, to be sure, though some concrete explanation of what it was rather than sub-X Files waffle would have been nicer. Later, Jack referred to the Blessing sites having been sealed up by UNIT; that was another nice nod. Less nice was an unwelcome return of what Russell presumably believes to be much-loved catchphrases from his time on Who. As Rex is shot, Jack gets a chance to annoy like Tennant by saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”. Followed immediately, as Rex wakes up, by Russell’s default season ending line – “What? What? WHAT?” I think I could have lived without hearing that one again.

But I could have lived with some credible resolution to the plot(s). Ok, so, The Families were trying to gain control of the world by using The Blessing to control when people live or die at their whim. All right, I’ll buy that. Except that, given the century spanning conspiracy we’ve already seen and the pseudo religious fanaticism displayed by The Families’ many catspaws in positions of power, they basically already do control the world. Do they just want more publicity about it? Also, if this is “phase one”, or a “trial run” as Mormon-missionary guy explains to Jilly later, just what are they planning for an encore? All right, I’ll grant you that this may be a teaser for a subplot in a later series (which may not be entirely welcome given the general reception of this one), but having massively shaken up a world they effectively already control and seemingly virtually own, it’s hard to see what more The Families are hoping for. After all, once you’ve got immortality, everything else falls into place, given time; what else could you need?

Then there’s the numerous contradictions implicit in the torrents of exposition we were given to explain the nature of The Blessing itself. For a start, there’s the surprisingly laborious means by which our heroes locate it. It’s a neat idea that Jack’s blood rolls towards it (though this presumably means that it has an inherent desire to return humanity to its normal state, despite Jack’s assertion that it’s trying to be kind by granting everyone immortality). But having established that the direction in which the blood rolls must point to The Blessing’s location, why on earth do our heroes than decide the best way to find it is simply to walk in that direction until they encounter something weird? These are supposedly professional intelligence agents (well, Rex keeps telling us that he is, anyway). Have they never heard of triangulation? Simply try the same thing in a different building, plot the two blood rolling directions until they intersect on the map, and hey presto, you’ve got the exact location. Perhaps less dramatically weighty than Gwen’s encounter with the improbably English-fluent old Chinese lady, but so obvious that it made our heroes look a bit silly.

As The Mother and her Buenos Aires counterpart The Cousin (does Russell have something against families in general, or did he just think such cryptic monickers were apropos of the recurring ‘homage’ to The X Files?) defused the tension with their mountains of inconsistent exposition, it became hard to care what was happening. Nonetheless, it became apparent that The Blessing had always been under the Earth (“the most terrestrial threat we’ve ever faced”, Gwen noted sagely), and via the scientifically dubious means of morphic fields had always controlled humanity’s average lifespan. OK, despite the New Age bollocks of morphic fields, I can buy into that within the rules the show has established for itself. But even here, it didn’t have any consistent logic. Given that The Blessing apparently controls the entire population’s lifespans rather than specific individuals, how were The Families planning to achieve the targeted control the Mother referred to? And leaving aside the question of how, despite previous assertions that this was impossible, it used Jack’s blood as a template for immortality, why did The Blessing’s change to humanity affect just him in completely the opposite way, and why was this reversed when humanity became mortal again? No explanations were offered, and by the time it became clear that Rex had caught immortality himself, it was as if Russell had just thrown in the towel as far as contradictions of the show’s internal logic were concerned, and fallen back on “What? What? WHAT?” Let’s be clear about this; I can suspend disbelief in any which way a sci fi or fantasy show demands, providing it’s consistent with the internal logic the show has established for itself. Lost cheated somewhat here by never actually explaining the rules of its universe, but Torchwood clearly has, and retconning them without a damn well-explained reason totally takes the viewer out of the drama.

There was some drama and thrills, but even these were not particularly well-handled. The idea that Rex had used his immortality to absorb all of Jack’s blood, thereby becoming a walking weapon, was a good one (and nicely signalled by Rex’s twinges throughout the episode, as The Blessing tried to drag his new blood towards it). Having established this trump card for our heroes, it was also dramatically rather good that the only way to return humanity to normal was for both Rex and Jack to sacrifice themselves by spewing all their blood towards The Blessing simultaneously. The fact that both were willing to do so (even after Jack’s recent assertion that he still enjoys living and will fight to carry on) was an excellent moment. Unfortunately, it was then totally undermined by the fact that, having made the heroic sacrifice, both were not just ok, but better than ok – immortal, in fact. The hard-hitting, no compromise approach at the end of Children of Earth was totally lacking here; it’s as though, in that show, Jack’s grandson appeared to die but was then shown to be fine. Drama that, in fact, totally pulls its punches.

And then there was Oswald. Bill Pullman was more naturalistic than usual here, but there was no revelation as to why exactly he’d been made out to be so important all the way through the serial’s run. I don’t mind a bit of misdirection, and the dialogue even spelled out earlier how insignificant he really was. But when The Mother dismissively told him that he was an “irrelevant by-product” of The Miracle, again I felt somewhat cheated. After all, if you’re going to have one of your story’s central characters be a murdering paedophile, there’s usually some kind of plot point reason for it, and you’d be expecting to see that at the story’s resolution. What we got here felt, again, like The X Files – and not even good X Files, but the terrible recent movie I Want to Believe, in which Billy Connolly’s psychic priest was, for dramatically spurious reasons, a convicted paedophile. It served no real story purpose there, and neither does it here; in fact it makes one feel a little queasy at having invested so much time in such a nasty character for no particular reason.

Oswald’s ‘heroic’ sacrifice, blowing up himself, The Mother and the pit of The Blessing, was not at all unexpected either. It felt dramatically pat that the character had been on a path of redemption all along, so kudos to whichever writer – my money’s on Jane Espenson – managed to make his ’noble gesture’ consistent with his character, as he looked forward to Hell because “that’s where all the bad little girls go”. So a mixed moment there – I always expected something like that to happen at the end, but I didn’t expect that they’d manage to keep Oswald consistently vile even up to his death. It’s one of the episode’s nicer touches that it can make you muse on how bad people may do the best of things for the worst of reasons.

Also dying this week was John De Lancie’s CIA boss Shapiro, which was a shame; if we must have another season, I would have liked him to have been in it. It wasn’t a particularly well-written part, but De Lancie seized on the character handles he was given to charismatically portray a believable and likeable boss figure in (inevitably) the Walter Skinner style. Great death line too; now that I’ve heard Q out of Star Trek say “oh fuck”, my life seems complete. It also seemed consistent with the (actually fairly believable) earlier portrayal of the CIA as some kind of CTU-like department of incompetents who would not only not spot an incredibly shifty mole, but also completely miss that she’d somehow managed to hide an incredibly powerful bomb in the back of a filing cabinet. Sherlock Holmes these guys aren’t, but they’ve been enjoyable in the same way that Jack Bauer’s compatriots were. And at least shifty mole Charlotte eventually got her comeuppance, through the incredibly contrived last minute data transfer to Rex’s phone (it even zoomed in on her name without him having to touch a thing, as though the phone itself was trying desperately hard to increase the tension).

Actually, Esther’s funeral was like some kind of reunion for all the major characters who’d survived. We saw Esther’s sister, who had rather implausibly been given back custody of her children; but it was a measure of how little I cared about that character’s unnecessary subplot that it took me a few moments to even remember who she was. And Rhys was there too, in LA for the first time – storywise anyway. Contrary to my theories last week, I’ve been told that, barring the exterior shots, all the Welsh material was actually filmed in LA too; so Gwen’s frequent and increasingly irritating phone calls home presumably weren’t charged at international rate. Still, more kudos to the production team for making the sets and costumes convincing enough that I actually believed those interiors were in Wales, a feat not many US TV productions would pull off given the depictions of the UK I’ve seen in the past.

I’ve been quite harsh on this episode, harsher in fact than I have on any of the others despite their perceived flaws. That’s simply because, with this being the end of the story, I can no longer live in hope that the flaws will be explained or ironed out later on. Or perhaps I can; the fact that Russell has left story plots hanging and his main villains uncaught and unpunished presumably means that he, or network co-producer Starz, is hoping for another season. Unfortunately, given this season’s lukewarm reception, I’d be surprised if that happened. That’s actually sort of a shame, because despite the numerous flaws in Miracle Day, it’s never been less than entertaining – for me at least. Despite all the holes I’ve picked in this last episode, even that was entertaining even though simultaneously disappointing; though again, I think Russell had written himself into a corner that was impossible to get out of. But it’s worth remembering that many of us weren’t too impressed with Torchwood’s first season either. After that, though, it gradually realised its potential, and possibly could again. Even with a multitude of flaws, there was much to like here, and I’ll post a short review of the series as a whole at some point. For now, though, unfortunately the best I can say is that this finale entertained without actually satisfying.

Doctor Who: Series 6, Episode 10–The Girl Who Waited

“Don’t let them touch you. They don’t know you’re an alien, their kindness will kill you.”

Now that’s how to do a good standalone episode! The Girl Who Waited was brimming over with so many good ideas, so much emotion, so much depth, that I actually found it rather hard to believe that this was written by the same Tom MacRae who wrote the execrable Cyberman two parter back in 2006. But then, that was one of MacRae’s first gigs, and he’s been doing a lot of writing since then. He’s plainly matured a great deal from the comic strip simplicity of Rise of the Cybermen, to give us a piece that addresses fascinating sci fi concepts, but where the plot is entirely, believably, driven by the characters.

To be fair to MacRae, Rise of the Cybermen had the feel of a script that had been drafted and redrafted many times, with insufficient attention paid to details between drafts. Having read in The Writer’s Tale how much work Russell T Davies put in rewriting scripts, the fault there is probably his at least as much as the original author’s. The Girl Who Waited might – who knows? – have been subject to the same attentions from Steven Moffat; after all, this is packed full of Moffat style tropes. It’s got creepy, faceless enemies with a catchphrase – “Do not be alarmed. This is a kindness.” It’s got a mindbending, time paradox driven plot. And it’s full of funny, heartfelt and emotional dialogue.

However, it’s significant that Moffat said he loved the idea when Tom MacRae presented him with it, and I suspect that was because it came ready formed with the aspects of Doctor Who that Moff himself loves. In other words, we’re seeing the work of a Tom MacRae who’s really honed his craft.

A craft that was first employed by Russell T Davies, and Russell’s influences were pretty evident here too. There’s a planet with a tongue twisting name (Apalapucia), a reference to ‘Disneyland Clom’ (less nauseating than the Earthbound ones, hopefully), and some nudgeworthy references to Amy and Rory’s sex life (“How many times did we play doctor?” – I wonder which ‘Doctor’ she meant).

The central premise of the episode is deceptively simple. Arriving at Apalapucia, the second best vacation spot in the universe (“The first is rubbish. Planet coffee shop.”), our heroes are confronted by an Adventure Game-like puzzle in the form of a set of doors with two buttons. Amy, much like Sarah Jane Smith in The Ark in Space, chooses the wrong path and is immediately separated from the Doctor and Rory. Unfortunately, the door she’s chosen leads to another, faster time stream, and her men must figure out how to get her back into theirs.

So, two time streams, one moving faster than the other. It’s simple, it’s high concept. But MacRae comes up with some interesting concepts to support it. Chen-7, the one day plague, has necessitated a time stream where the afflicted can live out a lifetime in the one day they have left; that’s why Amy never has to worry about things like eating. And conveniently, Chen-7 only affects two-hearted species like the Apalapucians – and Time Lords. This cleverly gives Rory a chance to be the actual hero, but all the while allows the Doctor to be the one pulling the strings. It’s been noticeable before that the Eleventh Doctor, for all his manic enthusiasm, has a darker, manipulative side much like the Seventh, often keeping his companions intentionally in the dark. That’s never been more evident than it is here, particularly with the final, devastating revelation that he’d been lying all along, and no amount of TARDIS technobabble would allow both versions of Amy to coexist. Matt Smith went nimbly from his usual young fogey persona to something much graver as he informed Rory that it was his choice as to which would survive.

But if Matt Smith was good here, the episode was dominated by the performances of Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan as Rory and Amy. Even with the Doctor as master-manipulator, this was really their story, and both actors gave it their all with some truly romantic and often heartrending dialogue. Anyone who still thinks after this that Karen Gillan’s not much cop at acting clearly isn’t paying attention. Her performance as the bitter, 36 years older Amy who’d all but given up hope of escaping the Two Streams facility was superb, as was her delivery of the speech explaining exactly why she loved Rory so much. Even the little moment when she realised that she’d just laughed for the first time in decades was beautifully played, and as for her dialogue with her younger self through the time glass, that was a showcase of two excellent, clearly distinct performances.

Arthur Darvill didn’t get quite the kind of challenge represented by playing two versions of the same character, but his performance showed us the truth of Amy’s assertion that, when you love someone, “their face… sort of becomes them”. It’s very true, and it’s a measure of how likeable Darvill has made the character. Last year, I wrote that he was ordinary looking. This year, I’ve made several references to how attractive I find him – and that’s because he’s written and played as someone you can’t help but love. I’ve not had a chance to see Darvill as Mephistopheles in the Globe production of Doctor Faustus yet, but if he can invest Rory with this much loveability, I’m guessing he can do a pretty evil demon.

Together, they make a convincing couple even with one of them embittered at 36 years of separation. I must say, the makeup given to Karen Gillan, convincing though it was, seemed to be rather flattering for someone who’s supposed to be presumably in her mid-50s – not even one grey hair? Still, it’s a bit churlish to complain about that, and after all it might have been down to the unnatural time stream inside the Red Waterfall part of the facility! Nonetheless, it was a measure of how convincing their chemistry was that I never questioned for a second that Rory would kiss this now much older version of his wife with just as much passion as he would normally.

Their final scene, on either side of the TARDIS doors, was a beautifully emotional one pitched perfectly by both actors. Blimey, Arthur Darvill can do good crying! And Amy’s quiet courage as she urged him not to let her in was equally well played by Karen Gillan. It’s one of the most interesting philosophical concepts the episode throws up; the idea that a future you from a potential time stream might be still keen to survive, and not to have their existence erased. It makes you question what you would do if someone gave you the chance to go back and change your own time stream. Would you go back, and right something you saw as wrong, even if (Grandfather paradox aside) it would mean that the you you became as a result would never exist? Initially I wondered why older Amy would be so keen to preserve the lifetime of solitude and hiding from killer robots, but as I asked myself that question, I realised that even a pretty lousy lifetime can shape you into a person you might not want to lose.

Perhaps that was the choice older Amy finally made, though. As the Doctor – really rather nastily, I thought – told Rory it was up to him which version of his wife he could save, I wondered if the episode might have been more appropriately titled Rory’s Choice. But then, as ever in their relationship, Amy made the choice for him. You could see this as an example of his emasculation; a lot of people have commented rather unfavourably on the idea that Amy is ‘the one who wears the trousers’ in their marriage, making Rory less of a hero than she is. I don’t think that’s true, as we’ve seen plenty of Rory’s quiet heroism and moral outrage. It was telling that, presented with this choice by the Doctor, he angrily blurted, “You’re trying to turn me into you!”, a shrewd moral judgement on the Doctor up there with Rory’s equally valid assertion last year, “You don’t know how dangerous you make people to themselves”. And here he gets to take out a killer robot by smashing it over the head with the Mona Lisa – fortunately we can be pretty sure this is one of the fakes!

No, Rory’s far from the wimp some critics make him out to be. But the fact that older Amy made the choice for him seemed to me a measure of her love for him; she didn’t want to put him through that, to have to live with the guilt of making the choice – to be like the Doctor. It was a genuinely moving moment as, with her last breath she asked the Interface to show her the Earth – “Did I ever tell you about this boy I met who pretended he was in a band?” I’m not normally one whose emotions can be easily manipulated by a TV show, but I couldn’t help welling up a bit there.

So an episode where the characters were at least as important – if not more so – as the big concepts, just the way Doctor Who should be. It’s telling that I’ve spent so much time writing about the characters’ stories and barely mentioned the sci fi aspects. With that in mind, I should mention that the Two Streams facility was depicted with a convincing sterile minimalism that brought to mind classic sci fi movies like THX 1138 and Logan’s Run; although presumably the intention was more to make it like a high class hospital by using whatever conveniently futuristic Cardiff building was available. There may have been a budgetary consideration, but if so, the production made a virtue out of the stark sterility without having to dress the place much. Even the basement with the temporal engines was clearly just a power plant with blue lights stuck on the generators, but it looked right, as did the CG topiary and mountains in the Gardens.

The most expensive element was presumably the Handbots – another interesting concept very nicely realised. Some clever direction convinced the viewer that there was a virtual army of them, but I’m guessing they built no more than three. And the ‘disarmed’ one that Amy named ‘Rory’ was a nice touch, with its hook hands and felt tip smiley face! I did think, however, that it was a bit of a waste of talent to cast the legendary Imelda Staunton as the voice of the Interface. She’s a brilliant actress, but even she can’t do much with an intentionally emotionless voice. Still, the fact that she wasn’t actually seen means that, hopefully, we can actually have her popping up on screen in a later episode – along with, hopefully, Michael Sheen who voiced House in The Doctor’s Wife. If nothing else, this year has shown some class in voice casting!

As you can tell, I loved this episode and thought it an excellent example of what Who can do as an anthology series as opposed to an arc (not that I dislike the arc either). But on that note, I do have to mention – again – how conspicuous it is that Amy and Rory aren’t, as my friend Gemma put it, “grieving for their tiny lost baby”. I wouldn’t want them to be dwelling on it constantly week in and week out, but it still seems jarring that such otherwise convincing characters would be already acting like that had never happened. With this issue left so obviously unspoken for the last two weeks, I’m seriously beginning to wonder if it’s intentional. If there isn’t a payoff, I shall be surprised (and a little disappointed). But then, there are so many questions still left unanswered, even from last year, and Moffat is clearly playing a long game. For now, it’s a minor fly in the ointment of this week’s otherwise excellent episode, and still won’t stop me from being amazed at how good Tom MacRae has become as a writer.

Doctor Who: Series 6, Episode 9–Night Terrors

“Look at these eyes. They’re old eyes. Let me tell you something – monsters are real.”

Poor old Mark Gatiss. He’s the consummate Doctor Who fan, and should be the consummate Doctor Who writer – he’s literate, he’s got a great grasp of how to make a script work, and he’s written some excellent Doctor Who novels for both Virgin Publishing and the BBC. He wrote the superb black horror comedy The League of Gentlemen, not to mention co-creating and writing the excellent Sherlock with Steven Moffat. As one who’s been involved with the new series since its 2005 debut, he should by rights have notched up a notable list of ‘classic’ episodes by now. And yet, somehow, he’s always perceived as missing the mark. He wrote the first non-Russell T Davies script – The Unquiet Dead, which I genuinely loved and thought made a better Christmas episode than most of the actual Christmas specials. However, even now that’s not really thought of as a classic. Next year he gave us The Idiot’s Lantern, a period piece which I thought was clever, witty and had some genuinely frightening moments. But that too was written off as being inconsequential, if not actually bad, by most. Then after a long break, he returned last year to give us Victory of the Daleks, and that time even I didn’t think much of what he’d written.

This time, however, numerous fan publications and websites were assuring us that Night Terrors would finally be the one that would propel Mark into the same reputational leagues as Paul Cornell, Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. In addition, Moffat himself was touting it as one of the scariest episodes ever, quoting the line from the script that quickly became the best known description of the story: “the scariest place in the universe – a child’s bedroom”.

All that hype actually seemed a little unfair. It would be hard for any story to live up to that kind of expectation, and sadly, Night Terrors didn’t. It’s by no means a bad episode, and certainly better than Victory of the Daleks. But given the possibilities of the concepts, and the undoubted talent of Mark Gatiss, it could, and perhaps should, have been a lot better than it was.

It’s telling that a lot of the reviews and comments I’ve seen so far relating to the episode spend less time talking about what it was like than talking about what other stories it was like. It’s been compared variously to The Mind Robber, The Celestial Toymaker, Sapphire and Steel, Gilliam’s Time Bandits, and, in our house, Paradise Towers. However, probably the most valid comparison is to 2006 episode Fear Her – that has essentially the same plot, with a stranded alien being in this case possessing a child and causing people to disappear when they annoyed or frightened her. There’s nothing wrong with having very obvious inspirations for your story, but Fear Her has a (deserved) bad reputation; and in any case I don’t think Gatiss intended his story to be derivative of any of these. But these are big archetypes we’re dealing with here: childhood fears, and the nightmares they cause. The question is, is it the commonality of the archetypes that make this script seem over-familiar, or is it a problem with the script having a rather formulaic approach?

There was some genuinely creepy stuff here. The business with Amy and Rory in the doll’s house was well-written and well-directed, and a nicely surreal concept to boot. Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I twigged what was going on way earlier than the script told us – It was obvious that, like everything that frightened little George, they’d been banished to the inside of his cupboard, and from the moment Amy found the wooden ‘copper’ saucepan, it was easy to guess that there’d be a doll’s house in there. And so, when the Doctor finally opened the cupboard, there was. Mind you, while I’m the first to dismiss any gender-based expectations, it still did seem unusual that a little boy would have a doll’s house.

Nevertheless, our heroes creeping around the darkened corridors, with the lurking shadows moving in the background, was a little unnerving, and very reminiscent of Sapphire and Steel. The gradual revelations that clued them in were nicely done – though surely if that glass eye was meant to be normal size, the doll’s house would have to be gigantic for it to fit in a toy chest of drawers – and the reveal of the well-designed blank-face dolls was creepy, particularly when it became clear that, like the unfortunate Mr Purcell, you’d turn into one if they caught you.

That’s all classic child’s nightmare stuff, and the story also captured well that childhood feeling of terror when the bedroom light goes out and every shadow becomes a threatening monster lurking in the dark. George’s little rituals – banishing the scary things to the cupboard, turning the lights on and off five times – also seemed familiar from my own dimly recalled childhood. The direction by Richard Clark caught the mood well in these scenes, but the script seemed to be rather less successful at dealing with the mundane, everyday part of the story the Doctor was caught in – “EastEndersland” as Rory scathingly put it.

Despite Rory’s sarcasm, the script at no point spells out that this is London we’re seeing, which is just as well as it seemed very much to be the same housing estate used in Russell T Davies’ tenure to represent Rose Tyler’s home. No, this was any estate, anywhere, with that oddly unnatural neon glow that streetlights provide nicely captured by the camerawork. There was a convincing community, economically evoked by the montage in which the Doctor and co knocked on doors trying to find out which flat the scared child lived in. We’d already seen Leila Hoffman as old Mrs Rossiter, so she was plainly going to be involved in the story proper, and Andrew Tiernan as Purcell is a familiar enough character actor to make it obvious that we’d see more of him too. But we also saw at least one more family, initially represented by one of Gatiss’ familiar tropes – an amusing recreation of the ultra-creepy twin girls from The Shining. Still, the lack of specificity about where exactly this was almost seemed to make it less convincing as an ‘everyday’ setting; the precise opposite from the defined suburbanity of Colchester in last year’s The Lodger.

Matt Smith was on great form as the Doctor, and Gatiss does seem to have a knack for giving him suitably ‘Doctor-like’ dialogue that matches his frenetic performance. He can’t resist the old in-jokes too; it was amusing to hear references to children’s classic stories such as ‘The Emperor Dalek’s New Clothes’ and ‘Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday’. He formed a good double act with Daniel Mays as George’s dad Alex, and it was a nice bit of subversion to see Mays, oft-cast as criminal hardmen, playing a perfectly normal average dad who’s scared for his child and worried about paying the rent (though if that £350 Purcell was demanding is the rent for the whole month, he’s getting a pretty good deal).

Rather less successful, though, was the rapport between the Doctor and George. It’s no particular fault of Matt Smith, or the dialogue the Doctor was given. But the script didn’t really give George any kind of personality of his own, beyond that he was a scared kid. I couldn’t really fault little Jamie Oram’s playing in the role, the problem was that he wasn’t really given anything to work with. At least little Chloe Webber in Fear Her was given a distinct personality. The trouble, I think, was that the episode started with a brief to tackle childhood nightmares and everything formed around that, rather than coming up with a convincing child character who might have good reason for the nightmares.

The twist that George was actually an alien cuckoo-like being called a ‘Tenza’ was probably the episode’s best reveal, but even here Gatiss could have striven to make the boy less of a cypher. And the rushed, rather pat explanation that the nightmares, and the disappearances, were a result of George’s fear that his adopted family wanted to abandon him seemed a little too convenient as a psychological explanation for George’s fear of absolutely everything – pantophobia, as the Doctor correctly called it, “which presumably does include a fear of pants”. At the heart of it, I think, was another of Mark Gatiss’ tropes, a dysfunctional father/son relationship that the story showed us at least the beginnings of healing. Tellingly, Claire, George’s ‘mother’, was barely in the story, only appearing at the very beginning and the very end. I wonder if Alex was planning on telling her the truth about their son?

The resolution that everything could be put right by Alex hugging George, and telling him that he would always be his son no matter what else he was, was sweet but again, a little too easy. After all, this was plainly a hugely powerful alien being, capable of (however unconsciously) brainwashing his ‘parents’ for eight years, creating a pocket dimension and imprisoning innocent people in it to be turned into creepy peg dolls. OK, it might mean no harm, but look at the trouble caused by one overheard conversation between his parents! It seemed a little odd that, however well-meaning, the Doctor would just allow the Tenza to stay where it was. He really should check back during puberty; although if the Tenza really is going to become whatever his parents want him to be, he’s going to be a pretty unusual teenager!

Those aspects of the plot were, perhaps, not handled too well. But there were other parts of the script that seemed to be more first draft and unfinished. What did happen to Mrs Rossiter inside the doll’s house? We saw her wandering the corridors looking scared, but didn’t see her again till she reappeared in the rubbish heap. Did she get turned into a doll, or did she hide successfully from them? Will she, and Purcell, remember their experiences? Amy seems to, and she did get turned into a doll. After all, if they do, and if they report it to somebody, Alex and Claire could find themselves surrounded by a UNIT SWAT team pretty quick, with George carted off to a secret base somewhere for ‘examination’.

However, all of those problems are as nothing compared to the really rather odd depiction of the series’ other two regular characters. It’s nice that Rory gets the self-aware line, “we’re dead, aren’t we. Again.”, but given what’s been happening over the last few episodes Amy and Rory seem very off-kilter. I commented last week that Amy and Rory seemed oddly unaffected by the revelation that they had, effectively, already lost their chance to be a normal family and bring up their daughter; Arnold Blumberg, over on Assignment X, found this to be the aspect that, for him, really torpedoed last week’s episode’s credibility.

The fact that, this week, the whole ongoing saga relating to their daughter didn’t even merit a mention served to make Amy and Rory less convincing than ever as real (potential) parents. It’s not that they’re in any way acting out of character generally (although Rory commenting “perhaps we should just let the monsters gobble him up” seemed unusually cruel for him). It’s just that, with the episode placed where it is in the series, it comes across as really odd that they’ve apparently forgotten the most important thing that’s been going on in their lives for months.

This can probably be put down to the standalone nature of the episode, and also that it was apparently swapped in the broadcast order with Curse of the Black Spot (though I don’t recall that mentioning their daughter either). If watched in isolation from the rest of the series, the viewer would probably find nothing at all unusual in the couple’s behaviour. But standalone episodes are rarely viewed in such total isolation. To be fair to Mark Gatiss, this is less his fault as writer than it could be Steven Moffat’s as showrunner.

I’ve argued before that a better balance between arc stories and standalone stories would be nice, but the showrunner still needs to bear in mind that the standalone stories feature the same characters as the arc ones, who would logically be feeling the consequences of previous events if they’re to be at all convincing. Joss Whedon understood this in his season plotting approach to Buffy, and so, despite my occasional criticisms of him, did Russell T Davies. It seems odd that a writer like Steven Moffat, who honed his teeth on emotional, character-driven dramas like Press Gang, would forget this. Perhaps, like the issue of the Doctor’s recent rather excessive violence, Amy and Rory’s rather inconsistent feelings about their complex family problems will be addressed in a future episode. All well and good, and I’m not disparaging the arc plot, but if that’s the case then it doesn’t stop them coming across very oddly here. And if it’s not addressed at all, then it looks like, I’m sad to say, slightly lazy season plotting, not something I’d expect from Steven Moffat.

The swap in running order with Curse of the Black Spot may also explain the one – possible – reference to the arc plot we do see this week. As our three heroes get together finally at the end of the episode, the Doctor comments, “Nice to be back together again. In the flesh.” Is this a reference to the upcoming (when this was still episode three) revelation about Amy in The Rebel Flesh? Or is it a hint about something coming up involving the Flesh? Perhaps the Ganger Doctor isn’t as dead as he appears. Since the line is delivered with none of the actors’ lips visible, if it was a significant hint from the show’s earlier place in the running order, it would have been a simple matter to remove it. Or perhaps it was never there before, and was added for the new place in the running order to hint at something we’re about to see. Or – and this is also possible – it’s just that “in the flesh” is a pretty common figure of speech, and the line has no relevance to the arc and isn’t meant to refer to the Flesh at all. It’s just that, where Mr Moffat’s plotting is concerned, you start overanalysing everything!

A lot of this review – like many of mine – is overanalysis. And some of it, I’ll be honest, is carping. But if this episode in particular is aimed at kids, I do seem to recall that they’re among the best at picking holes in a lack of logic. Come to think of it, one of the most irritating child’s questions – precisely because it’s usually very difficult to answer – is the repeated query, “but why…?” Night Terrors probably has succeeded in scaring a lot of its child audience with some genuinely memorable nightmare images. But those same kids may be even more adept than I am at picking apart the holes in the plot. Those holes, together with a sense that this standalone story is too isolated from this year’s series as a whole, mean that Night Terrors stands out not as Gatiss’ first true classic, but sadly as another entertaining, but routine episode that’s fairly forgettable.

Torchwood: Miracle Day, Episode 9

WARNING! AS I REALISE PEOPLE IN THE UK MAY BE LOOKING AT THIS BLOG FOR THE DOCTOR WHO POSTS ALSO, BEAR IN MIND THAT THIS REVIEW IS OF THE US SHOWING OF TORCHWOOD EPISODE 9, WHICH HASN’T BEEN ON UK TV YET, SO MAJOR SPOILERS!

The Gathering

“61 days into the Great Depression…”

And just like that, in its endgame two episodes, Miracle Day has shifted the narrative speed into hyperdrive. After weeks of ponderously navigating the murky waters of the plot and showing us in painstaking, often tedious detail every aspect of what’s going on, we’ve suddenly leaped forward to “Two Months Later” and in the interim, all sorts of things have been happening.

Firstly, the financial collapse so topically alluded to last week has obviously happened. It occurred to me watching this episode that the references to “the Great Depression” are in voiceover only, as were, if I recall, last week’s radio bulletins about Greece and Ireland defaulting on their national debts. All of which made me wonder whether this was a bit of topicality inserted at a late stage to capitalise on real world events that have happened since production was complete. Either that, or Russell T Davies is clairvoyant…

Be that as it may, the Depression fits very well into the scary new post-Miracle world. It also gives new momentum to the Government sanctioned Holocaust re-enactment of the “overflow camps”. My friend Richard, on his Millennium Dome blog review of episode 5, has expressed scepticism at the speed with which humanity hurtled to this point, which I must say I share. But a financial collapse really does recall the conditions which propitiated the original Holocaust, and this week’s insertion of, effectively, house-searching Gestapo agents was a rather less in your face reference to it than actually showing us the crematoria in action.

Certainly Ian Hughes as Mr Finch looked and acted the part as a modern day Welsh Herr Flick. Actually, it could be said that casting someone who looked – and was dressed – very much as a stereotypical Gestapo man is a bit lazy, but it’s a neat shorthand for who he is and what he’s doing, which is the kind of narrative economy the show’s been sorely in need of during its rather overlength run. With Gwen’s father hidden behind a board in the cellar like a latterday Anne Frank, Finch’s sojourns downstairs were genuinely tense (though I’m sceptical that even Apple can develop a thermographic imaging app for the iPhone). Nonetheless, his callous rejoinder to Gwen’s comment that her dad was still warm – “he’s about to get a whole lot warmer” – was genuinely chilling, in keeping with exactly what you could imagine the real Gestapo saying.

Outside of the UK’s fast development into a police state, though, there was a lot going on here to do with the main plot. Gwen, it seems, has been busy since the CIA deported her from the US last week. In the intervening two months, she’s set herself up as a one-woman ram-raiding black market for Swansea residents scared to go to the doctor for painkillers lest they be classified as category one. Besides doing that, and helping her mother to hide her father from the authorities, she’s also found time to set up some kind of lifeline by which she was able to smuggle Jack and Esther, not to mention (presumably without her actual knowledge) Oswald Danes into the UK.

The narrative economy of this skipping forward of the story not only gives the series a much-needed sense of vigour in the mode of Children of Earth, it also allows for real surprises to be spun in a way that’s generally been lacking this year. I was genuinely surprised when Oswald turned up at the Cooper house in Swansea, precisely because we hadn’t been shown in mind-numbing detail how he got there. One minute he was running away from Jilly, the next time we see him, he’s in Wales! It was noticeable that, as he was hiding his face from the cute young surveillance guy, it might not have been Bill Pullman himself in the exterior shots. But I’m guessing they really did fly him to Wales for those scenes in the Coopers’ kitchen – it would be cheaper to do that than fly the rest of the cast out to LA.

After the rather tokenistic depiction of Wales in recent episodes, it was refreshing to have an entire episode that pretty much centred on the UK. For that, and for the narrative zip this week, I would assume we have to thank Liverpool-born writer John Fay, who scripted the episode of Children of Earth that was most chilling, as remarked on in Richard’s blog entry linked to above – the one that centred on the Cabinet meeting discussing how best to capitulate to the aliens’ demands. As the only Torchwood old hand writing this series except for Russell, he’s given us the episode that most resembles – in tone and style as well as setting – the Torchwood of old.

It does still retain an international flavour, though, and thankfully this week that wasn’t just limited to the US and the UK. Over at CIA HQ in Langley, Rex was hard at work trying to track down paper records of Ablemarch, Costerdane and Frines, while seemingly unaware that Charlotte Willis was busily recreating the shifty actions of every mole ever seen in 24’s CTU – suddenly looking worried, disappearing from her desk to make furtive phone calls, being surprisingly defeatist about the chances of tracking down the relevant information. To give him credit, Rex has at least worked out that there is a mole, but I question his spook credentials that he can’t work out who it is.

Nonetheless, Rex did manage, via a ridiculously convoluted bit of research, to ascertain that one of the Families’ original conspirators had gone to ground in Buenos Aires. As a side note, given the century spanning nature of this conspiracy, it’s ever harder to reconcile it with the Doctor Who universe in which Torchwood is supposedly set; were the Families never inconvenienced by events like Dalek invasions? Still, be that as it may, the Buenos Aires link gave us another country to spin into the web – or perhaps I should say another country for the production team to dress LA up to look like.

LA was also dressed up to resemble Shanghai, a plot thread which, unlike many others, is actually being followed up. Shanghai, it seems, is part of the “specific geography” referred to earlier in the story. It’s also the location of “the Blessing”, as Jilly discovered when the Families’ hunky young representative dispatched her there with a one-way ticket and a new name. Jilly’s trip is characterised by a series of meetings with mysterious people who drop cryptic hints then tell her that she’ll never see them again – Fay has obviously picked up this trick from John Shiban’s X Files experiences. Finally, Jilly bumps into Frances Fisher – best known as Kate Winslet’s mum in Titanic, fact fans – who’s credited in the cast list as “Mother Colasanto”, implying that Angelo’s family had more to do with everything than we’d previously been led to believe. Apparently still playing Mrs Bukater – well, acting in the same style, anyway – Fisher took Jilly to see the Blessing.

And Gods alone know what it is. It looks like two rotating pink pillars, accompanied by gravity-defying flying bits. The Families may be human, but it’s beginning to look like this is the genuinely extra-terrestrial component of the story. Apparently it’s trying to communicate, and it can drive you mad. It also may run through the centre of the entire planet, like the words in a stick of Blackpool rock; something which Rhys, of all people, figures out with the aid of a conveniently available inflatable globe which shows him that Shanghai and Buenos Aires are precisely opposite each other on the Earth’s surface.

Oswald too has figured out that something odd’s up (to put it mildly) and thanks to him our heroes make a roundabout link to Shanghai. He refers to Jilly’s laptop mentioning ‘”Harry Bosco”, which according to Esther was the name of a CIA agent who routinely misinformed the American public about the Vietnam war by mistranslating Viet Cong transmissions for the US news media. I was intrigued by this, so I googled it (well, it works for Jack), but found no reference to Harry Bosco (if that’s how it’s spelled). I did, however, find reference to just such an alleged CIA project called Operation Mockingbird, set up by Allen Dulles in the 40s and apparently active up till the 90s, which placed CIA operatives in influential positions throughout the media, and may have been responsible for Ronald Reagan’s acting career, among other things. Scary, real-world stuff.

Off our guys pop, then, Rex and Esther to Buenos Aires and Jack, Gwen and Oswald to Shanghai. It’s another telling example of this episode’s narrative economy that we don’t spend an hour showing how they got there; they simply arrive in the scene after they say they’re going, as we can take it as read that they have the means. Esther’s taken many bags of Jack’s blood, which will be handy as we discover that it will roll, like the blood samples in Carpenter’s The Thing, in the general direction of The Blessing. This does give cause for worry about Jack; presumably, if he gets too close to The Blessing, this effect will cause him to get dragged into it!

So it’s finally all coming together. Jilly, the Families, our heroes, Oswald, all are converging on Shanghai to find The Blessing, and presumably, the long-delayed resolution to the plot. I appreciate that Russell T Davies was bound to make this series ten episodes long (and apparently it was originally intended to be even longer!), but the structuring of this episode showed how the story could have worked so much better, like Children of Earth, as a high-octane, cleverly structured five part story rather than the lumbering behemoth we were presented with. Next week, though, it all comes to a head and so Russell’s back for the first time since episode one on scripting duties – albeit with Jane Espenson’s capable help. I’ve carped many times in my Doctor Who reviews about Russell’s inability to write satisfying story endings, but Children of Earth was one of a few occasions when he managed just that. Let’s hope he can pull it off again.