Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fades, Episode 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to…Ludicrous Speed!

So, The Guardian have got themselves all agitated about Transport Secretary Philip ‘Mr Slimy’ Hammond’s proposal to raise the national speed limit to 80 mph, in this editorial, this article about speed safety and this article about environmental damage. And do you know what? Despite being a person of normally strong views, both a Guardian reader and a Top Gear fan, it’s an issue I find hard to care about either way.

On one hand, it’s true that the national speed limit was set at a time when most people’s cars would struggle to exceed 60mph. Nearly 50 years of advancement in automotive technology means that today, most cars can exceed 70mph routinely, and with far greater safety than cars travelling at 55 in the 60s. Would you feel safer to do a nice, modest 50mph in this:

Or an admittedly naughty 90mph in this:

I’ll grant, you shouldn’t be speeding in either. But if the limit was raised to 80 mph and you had a crash at that speed in the Mini, I think you can safely say you’ll stand a better chance of walking away from it than a 50mph crash in the Austin 1100 – well below the 70mph that was already the national speed limit when it was built. So the safety argument, for me, doesn’t really hold water.

On the other hand, the argument about fuel profligacy does – a bit. With fossil fuel dwindling rapidly, to the extent that wars are fought over it, it does seem illogical to tacitly condone driving at speeds that cause cars to consume far more of it. Fuel economy in a modern car is leagues ahead of one from the 60s. But it’s still true that the faster you go – and the higher your engine revs – the more fuel you will consume. In the case of a 10mph increase in the speed limit, with a modern car, it is possible that the increased fuel usage will be so negligible as to make little difference. Whether you support it depends on whether you believe any increase in fuel usage, however infinitesimal, is acceptable.

There are, of course, engineering solutions to that problem. Better chosen gear ratios is the most obvious, though the most sensible would be a more thorough approach to developing alternative fuels. I totally agree with the principle of making motoring more efficient rather than trying to stop it altogether, but until we come up with a realistic alternative to fossil fuel, it’s still ultimately an unsustainable activity. More efficient vehicles do postpone its inevitable end, but affordable and convenient public transport would postpone it still further. Not to mention making congestion far lighter for the inevitable people who still insist on driving. Ultimately though, the ideal would be to try and lower the amount of cars – and freight – on the roads.

A good start would be a decent rail network with financial incentives for companies to use it for freight. The sheer volume of large trucks on the road contributes vastly to both congestion and fuel usage. If this worked, profits from it could be used to subsidise passenger fares – right now, it’s always cheaper for two people to drive to a destination than buy train tickets. Even if they’re driving a 4 litre Jeep that does 15 miles to the gallon.
This would require massive investment in a decent public transport infrastructure, which in the short term would haemorrhage money. It’s the only sensible thing to do, but even if any politician had the guts to try it, I’ve no idea where they’d get the money from at this point. The private sector is unlikely to front up the money and the government simply can’t. So, making the current activity more efficient is probably the best solution we have right now.

Given all of that, I think that a 10mph rise in the speed limit comes off as a trivial, political, vote chasing move that ultimately makes very little difference to anything. So trivial in fact that I find it hard to care enough to support or oppose it. But if Mr Hammond must try to buy votes by allowing speed crazy Clarkson wannabes to tailgate me in their BMWs with impunity, so be it. I don’t think it will make much difference either to accident rates or to fuel usage. The one thing I’d ask is that it starts getting actually enforced – not by revenue generating speed cameras, but by actual, real human police officers who can make human judgements.

There’s the obvious fact that motorists slow down for speed cameras then speed right back up again once past them; average speed cameras help somewhat, but still have the basic flaw that, if you drive at 50 for half the distance between them, you can then drive at 90 for the rest without incurring any penalties. Two officers with a radar gun, placed at random times and random places, is a far better approach – and allows for human judgement about cases that aren’t clear cut, for example accelerating out of the way of a hazard. And speeding may be symptomatic of a driver in no fit state to drive anyway. A police officer would recognise this and stop the driver from going any further, potentially preventing accidents; a speed camera would merely issue them with a penalty after the fact.

But of course, we can’t have real policemen any more, because they cost too much. If The Guardian’s columnists are genuinely worried about reducing accidents, they might want to start with that. As to the 10mph increase in the speed limit, it’s a storm in a political teacup whose effect on the real world will be hard to even notice.

The Fades, Episode 2

“It’s inevitable… The world is coming to an end. There’s nothing you can do.”

After a storming first part, new BBC3 teen/supernatural/horror drama The Fades continues to impress – albeit with some rather puzzling leaps in logic. In what looks like a regular thing, the plot so far is summed up pre-credits by the hero’s best friend, the affable nerd Mac. And immediately I was a little bit confused, as he referred to mystery mentor Neil and his dead friends as ‘The Angelics’ – a phrase I don’t recall being mentioned at all in the first episode.

Still, ‘Angelics’ is what they call themselves, and contrary to the impression created in part one of there being just about three of them, it seems that they’re an established secret society who’ve been around since the 40s. Plunging the viewer into a world this complicated is not easy, which is why Neil spends most of this episode as Mr Exposition. In essence, he has to explain the rules of what’s happening to reluctant young hero Paul, and by extension to the audience. Fortunately, Jack Thorne is a skilful enough writer to intersperse this deluge of information with some more of the spooky, unsettling set pieces that made episode one work so well.

So Neil whisks Paul away from school to visit a particularly scary looking haunted house, explaining all the while. This is still germane to the plot; said haunted house is actually the abandoned Monica Bryant County Care Home, and we discover that this where Neil grew up. We discover this by means of an old photo uncovered under the guidance of the spooky young dead girl that Paul saw so much of last week, along with the disturbing (to Neil at least) revelation that the Fades are now capable of touching things. In this case, it’s a fuse box, and Paul nearly gets the shock of his life as she turns it on and allows bare wires to swing around the pool of water he’s standing in.

But that’s not the point of their visit; no, Neil wants to introduce Paul to his dead friend Eric, a Fade who was one of the first of the Angelics. At this point, the show’s internal logic does seem to waver a bit. Eric’s been dead a long time; since 1946, and he was 70 then. Neil says that, even dead, he’s continued to age since then. So if the Fade that tried to electrocute Paul was Neil’s teen girlfriend Natalie, why does she still look about 17 when he’s plainly pushing 40? Also, why is Eric not “getting a bit shitty” like Fades who’ve been dead for a far shorter time? And how can he still talk (even if it appears to be telepathically, so that only Neil can hear)?

Still, all of this may make sense given further doses of lengthy exposition, so it may be unfair to quibble at this point. What matters is that, after Eric’s touch of Paul creates a bit of a psychedelic light show, both he and Neil are convinced that Paul is someone special, someone very important to the oncoming war. “You’ve got a destiny,” states Neil sagely. “I’m sorry kid, but that matters.”

As with last week, this again gives the feel of so many classic kids’ stories of the supernatural, in which an unassuming young person (usually, but not always, a boy) discovers that he’s far from ordinary and has a special destiny as ‘The One’. It’s a staple of stories like this, from Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising novels to the likes of Russell T Davies’ Century Falls, and seeing it here only reinforces that feeling that The Fades is, basically, a classic Children’s BBC drama with added adult bits to appeal to the more aware teens of today. How much you enjoy it may depend on how much you think that’s a good thing; personally, I rather like it.

So Paul is ‘The One’. Or ‘a’ One, at any rate. We see a bit more of what that means for him this week. He’s still seeing the dead, and plagued by dreams; nor world-ending apocalypse this week, but a genuinely scary bit of business whereby he sees the dead bodies of his prospective girlfriend, his mum, and his bitch of a sister strewn around his house. While Mac chortles at the idea that Paul has a subconscious desire to see his own sister dead, nude, and in his bed, the implication is clear – his involvement in all of this is, like Clark Kent, or Peter Parker, going to put his nearest and dearest at risk.

But he can help them too; as he discovers when he inadvertently heals Mac’s cut arm, he also possesses the same healing powers as Daniela Nardini’s pistol-packing vicar from part one. This has the decidedly surreal side effect of causing the wielder to cough up a live moth whenever the power is used – a very weird bit of business that will, presumably, be explained later. Along with the fact that Paul can now raise birds from the dead and shoot lightning out of his palms when threatened.

Iain de Caestecker continues to be a likeable presence as Paul, perhaps because he is such a convincingly ordinary teenage nerd. As the more voluble Mac explains, they’re the lowest in the school’s social pecking order. So low in fact, that Paul can be mocked by a couple of twelve year olds, with the (admittedly rather bizarre) taunt “Am I a rabbit then?” when they overhear that he’s been seeing things. Paul’s the kind of boy I recognise, probably from myself; a troubled introvert from a broken home, with an obsession for pop culture and an almost pathological inability to speak to the object of his desire. It’s a laugh out loud moment when he finally plucks up the courage to tell his sister’s best friend Jay how he feels about her. He can only express this by listing a discussion he’s had with Mac about the ideal woman, which for them is apparently a combination of comic and movie heroines with George Lucas – “we thought about including Alan Moore as well, but the big beard would get in the way.”

And that’s indicative of the other thing that makes this series so enjoyable. Apart from an elaborately constructed world of supernatural menace, it’s also set in a very believable suburban secondary school, at which Paul and Mac are half-heartedly doing their A Levels. Jack Thorne’s background as a writer for Skins clearly comes in handy here, though this group of teenagers are pretty far from the drug-fuelled, hedonistic Bristol gang. Paul and Mac are believably beaten down and insignificant, while Anna, Paul’s utter bitch of a sister (the brilliantly nasty Lily Loveless) is the most popular girl in school.

And a debt is perhaps also owed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Thorne’s adept use of pop culture references, mostly via Mac. This week, it was a slew of Star Wars quotes; even as a Star Wars fan, I’m actually getting rather sick of its’ neverending stream of references in everything from different TV shows to my everyday life. Nevertheless, Mac’s persuasion of Anna and Jay to keep on fighting for the cancelled school ball “because there’s always an exhaust port” was a stroke of genius, as was his straight faced comment on Neil, “your friend’s quite a mercenary. I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody.”, which of course Neil doesn’t get.

Daniel Kaluuya continues to be probably the best character in the show as Mac, which if anything is a little bit of a problem. He’s clearly the wisecracking sidekick, but unfortunately his volubility next to Paul’s introversion means that he’s actually more charismatic than the hero. Kaluuya’s gift for deadpan humour makes this more pronounced, notably in the scene where Paul convinces him that Fade Natalie is sitting behind him in a cafe making eyes at him. His attempt to woo her with his teeth (“because dead people love good teeth”) is another brilliantly laugh out loud moment.

But it is also a very touching portrayal of the sort of friendship most people outgrow when they get much older than this. Baffled by Paul’s healing power, Mac asks him, “What are you?”, to which Paul instantly responds, “Your best friend”. And of course Mac’s response is, “don’t leave me behind”, which articulates perfectly how these relationships tend to go, particularly with the addition of a girl into the equation. You don’t need to live in a world of supernatural menace to have your heart broken by the friend you love abandoning you, a point made starkly clear when Mac sees Paul kissing Jay, then is brutally told by Anna that he needs Paul more than Paul needs him, a fact he clearly already knows.

The extension of Mac’s character beyond mere comic relief into actual pathos also intersects with the developing subplots of the show. His parents, it seems, have split up – “I bet they’re fighting over who doesn’t get custody” – which causes his dad to get quite violent with him in front of Paul. But his dad’s also stressed out by work. By a somewhat contrived coincidence, he’s the police Inspector who’s not only investigating the disappearance of dead Angelic Sarah, but also the murders of the two prepubescent bullies having a go at Paul earlier. The bullies were in fact murdered by the more militant Fades, led by that creepy bald one who sucked out Neil’s eye last week, and they’re murdering people to eat them and gain corporeality – a gruesome scene shows Natalie chowing down on their bodies. So The Fades are more than ghosts now. They’re getting to be like Romero zombies, but I’m betting you can’t take them down by shooting them in the head. And if they’re corporeal, you can’t make them disintegrate into ashes by passing through them any more, either.

Also inextricably linked into all this is Paul and Mac’s history teacher, Mark (the dishy Tom Ellis, who seems to spend a lot of time with his shirt off). Mark was Sarah’s estranged husband, and after a sympathy shag with a friend (watched by a presumably awkward feeling Sarah-Fade), he’s found some photos which reveal troubling facts about his wife. Mostly they seem to be of her in a mental ward, either strapped up or with her wrists bound. Clearly this is something Mark knew nothing of, so he takes them to the police, who don’t want to know. As a dramatic device, it’s fine, akin to a similar revelation to a husband about his dead wife in The Constant Gardener. But I have to say, I did find it rather odd that someone confined to a mental ward in, presumably, the aftermath of a suicide attempt would decide to have pictures taken of herself; even more odd that she would then keep and treasure them. Again, though, perhaps explanation will be forthcoming later…

This week’s episode concluded with Paul deciding that he couldn’t just abandon his life to ensure the safety of his family and friends. In keeping with his – and the show’s – endearing nerdiness, he’s taken inspiration from Peter Parker and Clark Kent, and is going to try to live two separate lives, one as ordinary schoolboy, the other as superpowered supernatural warrior. Actually, put like that, it sounds more like Buffy than Spiderman! Neil would probably be troubled by this, but a gang of Fades are busy trying to eat him, so he’s got other things on his mind. For some reason they haven’t finished the job, but it looks suspiciously like they may have had his intestines out. He’s in luck though – as I predicted last week, death has been no boundary for faith healing vicar Helen. This is a good thing, as Daniela Nardini is too much fun to waste in a one episode role. Now let’s see if she can put Neil back together again. But first she too has Paul on her mind: “Tell me about the boy.”

All developing nicely then, with a second part just as thrilling and intriguing as the first. Next week, it looks like we’re up for even more weirdness, as the throwforward depicts Paul waking up with angel wings (though his total nudity meant I was looking elsewhere than his wings). I’m looking forward to it, though I’m starting to wonder if such a labyrinthine story can be concluded successfully in just six episodes. I do hope Jack Thorne has written a proper conclusion that nonetheless would allow for another series, like Being Human, and not left everything on a cliffhanger that might never be resolved like so many recent US shows.

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.