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.

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Doctor Who bears witness in episode 6 #DemonsOfThePunjab #DrWho #DoctorWho #JodieWhittaker

I watched episode 6 of the new series with a certain trepidation: for the second time this season the BBC was choosing to revisit a highly sensitive moment in recent history. In the Rosa Parks episode (4), such revisiting had come disturbingly close to revisionism, cultural appropriation and the Doctor playing white saviour, all in the name of light entertainment/edutainment! It was a relief, therefore, to see the BBC judge it perfectly with ‘Demons of the Punjab’. Phew. This was an extremely moving episode. It was far more than light entertainment. Far more.

The Doctor’s assistant, Yaz, convinces her to take them all back to the Punjab of 1947 so that they can see the wedding of Yaz’s grandmother (an episode the grandmother is too reluctant to talk about). They arrive to discover that the Partition of India and Pakistan is just about to take place. Added to it all, the holy man who is due to oversee the wedding winds up murdered (apparently by demonic aliens), so it seems that the wedding won’t take place and Yaz will never be born! She’ll be erased from history.

More than that will spoil it, but it’s safe to say all is not as it seems. Of course, there can be no happy ending either. And it was extremely pleasing to see Yaz central to events, since she barely got a single line in episode 5. I highly recommend this episode – and trust that it represents the series really getting into its stride (after a slight wobble in episodes 4 and 5). Keep the faith!

Find your inner Viking! #Norsemen #Netflix #viking @NorsemenO

Series two of the hilarious Norsemen is now available on Netflix. It follows the story of a village of warriors who have found their way to the west and who go on periodic raids for the new riches to be found there. A competing tribe/clan/group is after the map so that they too can share in the wealth. Much chicanery and double-crossing inevitably ensues. This Norwegian series feels properly authentic (in part thanks to the spectacular landscape and Viking village setting) despite the fact that it contains a lot of modern humour. And don’t go thinking it’s dumb, because the full range of the humour will ‘test’ many a viewer – from surreal humour (with definitely a Monty Python influence/homage), to irony, to slapstick, to visual, to wordplay, to spoof (of A Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings), and it goes on. And the humour always has a point, as it sits in counterpoint to the brutally violent lives of the Norsemen – creating a philosophical and psychological interplay throughout.

You don’t really need to have watched series 1 to appreciate series 2, although it helps. And the series is only six half-hour episodes, so you can do a whole series in a single fun-filled sitting, like I did.

My favourite scenes usually involve the Norsemen having a motivational workshop (in which they agree shared values, etc, a bit like in Ricky Gervais’s The Office) or the ‘volunteer’ slave Kark (@oysteinmartnsn) who ‘enjoys the exercise and social aspect’ of being a slave! Fundamentally, the series deals with questions of identity, manliness, heroism, sexuality, etc, but never becomes judgemental or preachy – it always remains whimsical or wry, reflective and cheerful. There’s even a love story at its heart which feels quite credible. It’s all a bit like life, with its highs and lows, but refuses to get bogged down in navel-gazing.

Without giving too much away, series 2 does move the over-arching story forwards, so I’m now awaiting series 3 with relish. I wonder if I can get a cameo role if they film it on location in the west! If you haven’t caught up with Norsemen yet, then you’re missing out. I score it a civilized 9 out of 10.

(If you enjoy Viking fantasy, you might want to check out The Book of Orm too!)

Doctor Who fights an angry Pikachu in episode 5 #TsurangaConundrum #DoctorWho #DrWho #JodieWhittaker

So, episode 5 of the series is ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’. The Doctor and her companions accidentally set off a sonic mine on a junkyard planet and wake up on a medical ship. The ship is promptly boarded by a ‘Pting’ (a cutesy monster that looks like nothing more than an angry Pikachu), which proceeds to devour all the ship’s vital components and systems. To make things worse, it destroys the ships life pods, meaning the crew cannot escape in any way. Nor can they ‘fight’ the Pting, cos its skin is poisonous and it can devour all materials in existence. It even gobbles up the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.

The big ‘conundrum’, then, is how the Doctor can save them all, while still telling jokes. At the same time, there is a male passenger who’s heavily pregnant. A comedy birth scene will need to take place. And there’s a sick space general (Eve Cicero) who’s dying. So, we’ll need to engineer a meaningful, self-sacrificing death scene for her. And the Doctor has injuries from the sonic mine, so she has to wince her way through many a scene. In fact, things feel so contrived throughout, that the viewer can’t help wincing a fair bit either.

This episode is a curious one. There’s a lot going on, but for most of the episode all the Doctor’s companions feel like spare parts. They simply follow the Doctor around and serve as foils for exposition. The character of Yaz barely has any lines throughout. Bradley Walsh gets plenty of droll lines, but he’s commenting on the action as a bystander really, and Ryan provides an emotional but entirely random/irrelevant narrative about how his father ran out on him when he was young. Ryan hasn’t yet forgiven his missing father, and that’s why he’s never really got on with the ‘stand-in father figure’ of Graham (Bradley Walsh). At one point Ryan says, ‘Why am I even talking about this?’, and the viewer has to wonder the same.

All that said, the hectic and pell-mell nature of things means that there is just enough entertainment to see us through. Yet, without the considerable acting chops of Jodie Whittaker, the series and the BBC would probably have ended up embarrassing themselves. Jodie even does the ‘educational’ bit about the anti-matter engine (‘like an iPhone version of the particle accelerator of CERN’) with a certain panache (so the BBC can tick it’s box of supplying edutainment for the world). To quote the Doctor at the end of the episode: ‘Hope prevails!’ But episode only scores 7 out of 10 from me.

Counterpart will grab you by the googles! #Counterpart #SerraioccoSara #J.K.Simmons

[Guest review by Nadine West (@andiekarenina)]

If you can measure how gripping a new TV show is by how quickly you google “will there be a season 2?” after your binge-watch of Season 1, then Starz Network’s Counterpart has to be counted as a roaring success. The end credits had barely started to roll before I was urgently searching for reassurance that I would get to spend more time in the compelling parallel universes that creator Justin Marks has so skilfully brought to life.

Counterpart centres around the main character of Howard Silk (Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons), who we are introduced to as a low-level clerk working in a humdrum government department in Berlin: he is mild, cowed, a little defeated, shuffling between his workplace, where he exchanges impenetrable coded messages with other grey men in sinister booths, and the hospital where his wife lies in a coma. The work he does involves espionage of some kind but at such a faceless, bureaucratic level that he knows little about its function. He longs for promotion, but is repeatedly passed over due to his age and passive temperament. Of course, in short order, it is revealed that nothing here is as it seems. A crisis sees Howard thrown headlong into the secret that lies at the heart of this shadowy organisation: the Berlin he lives in is also the gateway to an alternate universe, which split from his own thirty years ago, and is the crossing-point for spies, diplomats and assassins from this parallel dimension. When Howard’s counterpart – his other self from the parallel world – arrives to investigate a high-level conspiracy, he, everyone around him, and the security of his world as he knows it, are plunged into danger.

The plot of Counterpart is taut and twisting, and plays deftly with tropes of the thriller and cold-war espionage genres: the highest levels of security have been compromised, two worlds in uneasy co-existence are tumbling towards open warfare, and no one can be trusted. Its storytelling is always engaging, with cliffhangers and sudden betrayals used to great effect. But the true genius of this series lies in the dual roles played by the central cast: everyone has another self in the parallel word – their counterpart – and these identical-seeming others are often very, very different. J.K. Simmons, playing both Howards, is simply masterful here: Howard from the other world is a high-status bully, an alpha male who arrives with a swagger of authority, in stark contrast to “our” Howard, and the scenes of conflict between the two Howards are virtuoso masterclasses of the actor’s abilities. In early episodes, you can tell which Howard you are looking at from the first second he appears on screen through Simmons’s chameleonic performance alone.

One of the fascinating details of writing here, however, and one of the series’ key themes, is whether small choices we make truly shape who we are, and whether nature, or 30 years of nurture and experience, really defines us. Are the counterparts really as different as they seem? Olivia Williams and Sara Serraiocco also excel here, Williams as Emily Silk, wife to Howard in both worlds, and Serraiocco as Nadia/Baldwin, a troubled concert violinist in “our” world and an equally troubled assassin in the other, who is assigned to kill her own counterpart. The series raises the question of what defines an individual over and over again: Emily from the other world is a high-level spy, amoral and hard-nosed; is Emily in “our” world the simple, devoted wife we believe her to be? Baldwin and Nadia have very different lives, but can either of them shake the years of brutal abuse that defined their shared childhoods before the worlds diverged? And, most centrally, is one Howard a brute and bully, and the other a weak and lonely pushover, or do they share more than we might think?

Counterpart wears its Sci-Fi lightly, avoiding clumsy exposition and allowing our understanding of the nature of the two worlds to unfold organically as the plot develops. It looks stunning, with clever cinematography and set design which occasionally reminds the viewer of Andrew Nichol’s Gattaca in its hearking back to a cold war aesthetic which is both evocative and unsettling. Small differences between the worlds are placed judiciously – the use of divergent technology is particularly effective – and questions about the origin of the worlds’ divergence are allowed to remain shrouded in secrecy. It doesn’t over-explain, and as such retains a real grasp on the viewer, as we discover the darker aspects of this dystopia for ourselves. The climax of series 1 is full of tension, shattering in execution, and reminds us that realpolitik between nations can be a cruel, cold thing, and that any one of us is capable of both shocking violence and dreadful compromise in the name of those we love.

The good news is that Season 2 begins in December 2018, and that we do not have long to wait before we can step back across the border between these two worlds. Counterpart has a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which even I think is over-egging it just a little, but it’s certainly a 9.5 out of 10 from me.

Doctor Who does Trump in episode 4 #ArachnidsIntheUK #DoctorWho #DrWho #JodieWhittaker

‘There’s something wrong with the spider eco-system in South Yorkshire,’ says the Doctor. Surely, an immortal line. But she’s right. There’s something very wrong. Very wrong indeed. Damn big ass spiders, that’s what! (I hate spiders.) And they’re over-running Sheffield. Wrapping people in webs to be eaten later. (This’ll scare adults and kids alike, trust me.)

And that’s not the worst of it. The spiders have been created by illegal toxic-waste dumping under the latest Trump hotel. Okay, it’s not Trump himself, but someone who is entirely in his mould. And he’s the monster that created them. In fact, he’s more of a monster than the spiders are.

It’s not the subtlest political satire. But it works all the same. This episode, ‘Arachnids in the UK’ (a pun on the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK album title), is very much a standalone episode, but that doesn’t mean it’s a lesser episode. There is a lot that is very touching in this episode: about what enobles us as humans, about what we have in common, about what things transcend race, and about what lives beyond each of us as individuals. When the different sub-plots are considered in relationship to each other… maybe the satire and poignancy are entirely subtle after all. Maybe this is actually a wonderful episode. I would certainly recommend it. Give it a chance and let it mulch… like the toxic waste under Trump’s latest project. I score it 8.5 out of 10.

Doctor Who plays white saviour in episode 3? #DoctorWho #DrWho #Rosa #JodieWhittaker

Hmm. I watched episode 3 of the new Doctor Who series with deep unease. The episode ‘plays’ with US civil rights history, ‘using’ the 1955 incident in Alabama that involved Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. The resulting ‘Montgomery Bus Boycott’ was one of the key moments in the ending of segregation in the US.

In the episode, an intergalactic white supremacist called Krasko (also a mass murderer, just so that we’re clear he’s properly bad) is trying to change Earth history by introducing a series of small and apparently random changes. The Doctor and her chums set out to preserve/restore history. It’s like an episode of that old series Quantum Leap, in many ways.

Unsurprisingly, the episode entitled ‘Rosa’ has caused a bit of furore in the press. Arguably, the episode is revisionist, retells the moment via an enlightened ‘white saviour’ and is infantilising/exploitative. The ending of segregation in the US is depicted as having come from a small set of accidents and trivial incidents. Oh dear.

These problems exist despite the fact that the episode was actually written by Malorie Blackman, the British woman of colour who was Children’s Laureate 2013-15 and who holds an OBE. And it is clear that the episode is well-intentioned, educating a young UK audience about how others have suffered so that they might have certain freedoms, ticking the BBC’s strategic boxes of wanting to be ‘a global educator’. The episode does carry emotional impact and succeeds in describing Rosa’s bravery.

Inevitably, however, the episode never feels entirely authentic or persuasive. Everything is treated with a light touch and humour abounds – I’m really not sure the ‘tone’ is right for dealing with complex and often painful social issues, issues that are still causing society much heartache and grief (with the recent Windrush revelations, what is happening on the US-Mexican border, etc).

So, the episode attempts something brave (and even heartfelt), but it is extremely problematic in implementation, some might argue. It’s something of a misfire, perhaps, so only scores a 7 out of 10 from me.