Spooks: Series 10, Episode 3

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

SpooksDimitri

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.”

WeddingRiverSong

“…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!

80mph

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:

Austin1100

Or an admittedly naughty 90mph in this:

BMWMini

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.”

FadesEp2

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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spooks: Series 10, Episode 1

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

HarryPearce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GodComplex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Torchwood–What kind of Day has it been?

MiracleDay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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