Darth Vader pretty much appears in final episode of Doctor Who #DrWho #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker #TheBattleofRanskoorAvKolos

Episode 10 (The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos) is very good indeed. It brings closure to the tragedy of Grace’s death in episode 1. The companions Ryan and Graham finally sort out their man-nonsense. There’s a nice religious element (with a false God) and plenty of scifi spaceships too – a proper dark science or gothic episode, this one.

The Doctor and companions answer a distress call and materialise amidst the wreckage of a recent battle. Broken spaceships lie all around. The psychotropic waves emanating from the planet play tricks on the mind and make people forget their own names. They find a survivor who has retrieved a powerful device, but knows not from where. Neither can the survivor remember what he needed the device for… nor where his crew have gone.

Turns out, a baddie has the crew hostage and will kill them one by one if the Doctor doesn’t return the device. Also turns out the baddie is an adversary from the start of the series too. Graham has murder in his eye and swears he will have revenge for his wife’s death in episode 1. This sets Graham at odds with the Doctor (who will never sanction killing) – and there is a fascinating stand off between them. The viewer genuinely has divided sympathies, especially as the baddie is proper bad (definitely channelling Darth Vader) and intent on destroying the universe with his sick superweapon.

There are moral dilemmas and genuine jeopardy in this episode. It looks like the Doctor is properly out-gunned this time… and it’s all of her own making too. There’s a lot of dark and cosmic irony going on. The Doctor’s also not the biggest noise in the universe either, cos we meet a couple of beings more powerful than her!

Suffice it to say, this episode redeems the series somewhat (cos there were some definite duff filler episodes along the way). It makes me proper look forward to the New Year’s Day Special too! Hurrah! Onwards!

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‘God’ is a talking frog in episode 9 of Doctor Who #JodieWhittaker #DoctorWho #DrWho #ItTakesYouAway

At last! A well written episode of Doctor Who! The plot is coherent, it isn’t overloaded with extra characters and themes, and there’s an actual moral dilemma to engage us properly. Phew, cos we haven’t had a decent episode since Demons of the Punjab (episode 6). The Doctor and her companions materialise by a beautiful fjord in Norway (cue a reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide vis-à-vis ‘the frilly bit in the north’). There’s an isolated cottage by the water… that’s barricaded from the inside. The Doctor and crew check on what’s going on, to find a girl who has lost her father to a monster in the woods. I was expecting a Beowulf type episode, and actually there are strong echoes of such a storyline (albeit in a modern setting).

There’s a murder-mystery and horror vibe to things (Scandi Noir style) as our heroes investigate what is really afoot. They find a strange mirror that doesn’t always show their reflections. Turns out… it’s a portal (not a spoiler, believe it or not).

Suffice it to say, the Doctor and co. end up in an anti-zone between realities… and then encounter a ‘conscious universe’ completely alien to our own. The ‘Solitract’ (the name a clever play on ‘Tesseract’ of Transformers and the Marvel universe perhaps) has existed since the beginning of time, but was exiled from our own universe because its individual nature interfered with the creation and running of our own universe. It’s become lonely and is looking to access our universe, to attract humans towards it. The character of Graham (the brilliant Bradley Walsh), still grieving for his dead wife, believes he’s found his lost love.

This is a moving and intelligent episode (replete with intertextuality). It describes exactly where we’re at in the field of astrophysics and where we’re at in terms of the deity/free will debate. It has both a personal and cosmic scale. How the writer pulled it off in a mere 50 minutes… it’s a triumph of SF writing. Scores a 9 out of 10 from me!

Downsizing is far from a diminutive movie #Downsizing #MattDamon

Imagine a Norwegian scientist discovered a way to miniaturise people so that they were only six inches tall. Each person would eat far far less and pollute far far less. They wouldn’t even need to work for a living really, cos just one normal-sized apple could feed a town of mini-people for a week. World hunger would end and we would save the planet to boot.

That’s the premise of the extremely thought-provoking movie Downsizing, starring Matt Damon. Now imagine you were normal-sized, in a dead end job and struggling to pay your bills. You work so many hours that you only have time for fast food and you’re becoming overweight. Wouldn’t you want to completely change your life? If you were to miniaturise yourself, you would suddenly be resource-rich and time-rich. You could start spending time getting fit and developing your inner self (doing art, writing, whatever you want)! Your life would be like one of the rich and famous. You’d socialise with similar people and start partying like a celebrity.

Surely you’d want that, right? Matt Damon takes the plunge. He wants to escape his humdrum life of poverty and depression. But he arrives in the palatial village for mini-people and just doesn’t feel comfortable in his own skin. Somehow, he just can’t quite seem to fit in. It all seems too good to be true…

And of course, so it proves to be. I’m gonna avoid spoilers at this point. Suffice it to say, people don’t really manage to escape their problems and get to paradise. No. They bring their problems with them. Because people ARE the problem.

The movie Downsizing is as satirical as it is big-hearted. It has political messages, eco messages, social messages and a philosophical stance. No wonder it has divided critics so much.

Take it from me, though. You won’t watch a more interesting and potentially more provocative Hollywood movie this year. I enjoyed it immensely. Give it a try. Or end up short-changed. It scores 8.5 out of 10 from me. So there.

The Doctor desperately hunts for witches and coherence in episode 8 #JodieWhittaker #DoctorWho #DrWho #TheWitchfinders #AlanCumming

Episode 8 (‘The Witchfinders’) of the new Doctor Who series is overloaded with themes – feminist themes about the treatment of women, King James coming to terms with how his mother abandoned him, a young girl suffering and eventually overcoming her anxiety, Yaz working through how she was bullied at school, witchcraft, demons rising, mud tentacles, aliens taking over the Earth, the homosexual leanings of the King, a murderous woman in denial about her lowly past, scapegoating, and a few others I’m sure – so many themes indeed that they can never all operate coherently at the same time. And despite all the apparent content, we never really cared about any of it – because there was no real moral dilemma involved. The writers of the current series really need to understand that less is more. More is not more. And even more is… just a mess.

The episode opened extremely strangely, with the Doctor warning her companions not to interfere with anything, because it could change history and the future. It was very much like Star Trek’s Prime Directive. But the whole point of the Doctor is precisely that he/she interferes. Indeed, in all the other episodes of the series so far, the Doctor has consistently interfered. So, our gang stands by and watches an innocent woman drowned as a witch (despite the Doctor’s last minute attempt to save her). The murder left me a bit befuddled. What was the episode trying to say? Bizarre.

Don’t get me wrong: there were some great things about the episode. Alan Cumming was magnificent in the role of King James – and was an excellent foil to the always excellent Jodie Whittaker. There were some great lines and jokes, and some great moments (like the Doctor being accused of being a witch).

But the ‘messages’ of the episode were always a bit off, flippant, paradoxical or throwaway. The young girl suffering anxiety eventually shrugs and says ‘Well, I’ll just have to be brave’. This is utterly anticlimactic, and a misrepresentation of the debilitating nature of the anxiety many young people suffer today. King James is charming and endearing – and by the end is simply told not to conduct any more witch-hunts – yet it is historical fact that James conducted many more decades of terrible witch-hunts. And so it went.

It was all a bit of a shame really. It had all the essential elements and potential of a brilliant episode. It just didn’t quite work. It scored 6 out of 10 from me. (And I’m now beginning to think that I’ll have to help out the BBC by writing an episode myself.)

The witch who would buy your tears #gothic #witch

I saw a young girl weeping

And an old witch then approach

‘I’ll buy your tears, my girl,

For I have shed all my own.’

The maid was much affrighted

But wanted none of sorrow.

‘Take them with my blessing, then

As they’re just a curse to me.’

Doctor Who saves Amazon in episode 7 #Kerblam! #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker #DrWho

A robot delivery man carrying a mysterious parcel teleports onto the Tardis. It’s a Kerblam! delivery (a sort of intergalactic Amazon) and the Doctor gets all excited. But there’s a message in the parcel: ‘Help me!’ The Doctor and her pals decide to go undercover in the Kerblam! distribution centre to find out who needs their help. The centre is of course highly automated – full of creepy robots – with only a 10% quota of human staff (the lucky ones in the galaxy, apparently).

It emerges that the human staff have been disappearing! One of the staff is Lee Mack – he’s allowed one decent joke before he is spirited away in the spooky lower levels of the centre. It’s a shame we don’t see more of him in the episode really, as he displays far more verve than the other staff, who are mainly dull sorts (to be honest, we don’t really care too much what’s happening to them).

Yes, this episode sets out satirising Amazon, SportsDirect and warehouse companies in general. Except the satire is a bit confused. The working conditions aren’t that bad, although the jobs are dull. The staff are grateful to have the jobs, because it seems that the rest of the galaxy has been made unemployed by automation and A.I. So is the episode a criticism of automation and A.I.? Well, no, not really, as the ending completely retreats from any real condemnation of automation (I’m avoiding spoilers here). So it’s not entirely coherent, sadly. The end is a bit of a fudge and a fumble.

There are nice things about the episode. It feels properly near-future and relevant to today. It’s a warning of what will happen if we don’t take steps now. There are the usual quips and moments of pithy moralising from the Doctor, and the compulsory chases down long corridors. The BBC attempts it’s usual edutainment for the masses. But the social politics and socio-economic underpinnings are an utter mess, in truth. It’s an episode of the week, a filler and ultimately a bit of a sell out. It only gets 6.5 out of 10 from me. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed next week, cos there are witches in the time of King James I.

 

Is Sabrina good with bad bits, or bad with good bits? #Sabrina #SabrinaNetflix #KiernanShipka

[Guest review by Nadine West (@andiekarenina)]

Is Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” a bad series with some brilliant bits, or a good series with some awful bits? After watching all ten episodes, I am still no closer to a decision. The 2018 reboot of the 1990s tween comedy classic certainly generated a huge amount of online debate. Riding the reboot wave seems to be the current trend: new Dynasty, new Charmed, new Buffy and even, god help us all, new Shrek are all either coming soon or already featuring on a streaming service near you. And it’s safe to say that the results of reboot mania are mixed at best. So what approach would Netflix take with its new Sabrina, dropped with perfect timing into 2018’s Halloween weekend?

Tonally, aesthetically and spiritually, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina comes as quite a shock. In stark contrast to the perky original series, and even to Netflix’s other teen-friendly Archie Comics stablemate, Riverdale, Sabrina is fully committed to darkness and horror. There is no soft-focus pagan mythos here, nor is there the cutesy magical realism of the original series’ “girl witch has pretty benign magical powers which originate from who-knows-where, with hilarious cats and consequences.” No, in Sabrina 2018, these witches take their powers from Satan, directly: yes, that Satan, the one from the more literalist versions of American Christianity, hooves, goat-head, horns, embodiment of infinite evil, the works. These witches worship Satan, sign their names into his book in a dark forest ceremony, practice ritual cannibalism and sacrifice, and want to bring about his reign on earth. Things only get darker as the series progresses and the body-count mounts.

The effect is genuinely much more shocking than I had anticipated. One has to wonder what the Bible Belt made of it all. Certainly Roberto Aguire-Sacassa, as executive producer and writer/director of various individual episodes, seems to relish the potential for outrage. Where his vision succeeds is often with characterisation: in particular, Sabrina’s aunts, Hilda and Zelda Spellman (Lucy Davies and Miranda Otto) are very well drawn. (In one darkly humorous touch that seems to nod to Cain and Abel in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Zelda is prone to brutally murder Hilda when she becomes irritating, only to see her magically resurrected by nightfall.) Tati Gabrielle is excellent as Prudence, the Cruel Intentions-esque mean girl who torments Sabrina at the Academy, and Michelle Gomez chews the carpets and steals every scene as Madam Satan.

In contrast to the supernatural characters, however, the human characters largely flop. Harvey, Sabrina’s boyfriend, is quite remarkable in his dullness. Even as the centre of one of the show’s most harrowing story arcs, he manages to suck the life out of every plot twist. Lachlan Watson delivers a compelling performance as a gender-ambiguous Susie Putnam, one of Sabrina’s best friends, but the script seems at a loss to know what to do with the character and seems to nibble around the edges of a gender-dysphoria storyline without every really engaging with it. Jaz Sinclair has more joy as Roz, another friend who may also be touched with supernatural power, but the writers never really manage to convince us that the mortal world has an unbreakable hold over Sabrina when it seems so very beige.

The series finds even more ways to vacillate between great and awful throughout the ten episodes. The cinematography, set and lighting? Largely gorgeous. The obsession with fuzzy edges of camera focus for “sinister” effect? Awful, irritating and frankly GCSE-film-studies levels of naff. The plot? Often brilliant, especially the necromancy arc and the slow building of Madam Satan’s power. The plot holes? Excruciating. (Astral projection is built up as a terrifying risk in one episode, only to be used mundanely in the rest of them. Sabrina’s father seems to have left her personal clues to unlock a magical box he made, which then unaccountably disgorges an evil curse on her. Ambrose is under house arrest, has been for decades, for unforgivable crimes which are then worked around and basically forgiven in five minutes flat in Episode 5.) The writing? The second episode is so good we were bouncing on our chairs in excitement: the first episode is so clunking, expository and obvious that we very nearly didn’t watch the second episode. What makes this even more frustrating is that these episodes were written and directed by exactly the same people. The climax, after you’ve sat through all the other frustrations? Genuinely thrilling, frightening and brilliant.

A mixed bag, then, this new Sabrina. I enjoyed lots of it, but rarely got to the end of an episode without grumbling at the tv screen. I will almost certainly watch the second series. However, I will never fully forgive the creators for taking wisecracking, wry Salem away from me and turning him into a tedious, mute stunt-cat who occasionally miaows a “something wicked this way comes” warning and then promptly buggers off. Be warned: you can take my 90s comedy and make it twisted, Netflix, but you can never take my talking cat.