Inside Out 2 (2024)

 "Maybe this is what happens when you grow up..."

So today, having watched the original Inside Out, today it was off to the cinema with Little Miss Llamastrangler to see a seqiuel that's come out a massive nine years latert. I suppose one may be inclined to see that as a worrying sign, as well as the fact that the main point of the film- puberty- was telegraphed all those years ago.

So is this the equal of the first film? Well, no, not really. But it's still good, and Little Miss Llamastrangler loved it, which counts for an awful lot as far as I'm concerned. The way the concept was handled was superb. New emotions such as Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui (my absolute favourite)... and the superb Maya Hawke absolutely stealing the show as Envy.

Wisely, the film takes place over a limited period of time in Riley's life, as she goes to an ice hockey camp where she absolutely must impress, and is torn between old and new friends. The horrors of sexual awakening, I trust, can wait until the next film, presumably in 2033.

The plot works out well, with lots of nice little humorous moments. The ultimate resolution is a little trite, though, and the film overall doesn't have quite the pizzazz of its more original predecessor. Nevertheless, these things are hardly crimes, and the new emotions are great. This is well worthy seeing.

Inside Out (2015)

 "Forget it, Jake. It's Cloudtown."

This is a film chosen not by myself but by Little Miss Llamastrangler. It's been a while since I've seen a Pixar film, and this one I's never seen before.

Yet I've never seen a Pixar film I didn't like, this one included. It's not necessarily a genre I'd usually seek out, but good films of any genre can be hugely enjoyable. I mean, I've even watched and blogged Grease...

I must admit... I'm a Brit of a certain age. So, with apologies to those who don't get the reference, I was very much reminded of the Numbskulls from The Beezer. But the concept was superb. On, on the surface it's about a littlre girl's anthropomorphised emotions, yes. But it's about the uncertainties of change, especially rocky ones, when one is growing up.

And it's also about the necessity of sadness, too. We know what Joy is for. Anger, Fear and Disgust protect us. But Sadness? It takes the whole film, more or less, to effectively drive home the lesson: we could all do with a bit of melancholy, sometimes.

We also have lots of little in-jokes from the grown-ups, a random supporting role from Kyle MacLachlan, no less, and some bloody brilliant imaginitive concepts. Not, then, the sort of film I'd often seek out, but very good stuff nonetheless.

Update

 This is just to say that, for life reasons, updates may be thin on the ground this week. All will return to normal after next weekend, though, fear not.

The Boys: Beware the Jabberwock, My Son

 "It's an absolute wonder to me that you've all managed to live this long..."

Oh my. Only The Boys could possibly do flying killer sheep infected with Compound Vi quite like this episode. As ever, this is exquisite.

So many little touches. I love, once again, the little bits of Vought advertising excess, with its tone deaf attempts at diversity and the blatant not to Kevin Feige's public unveling of the next raft of Marvel films.

There's so much more, though. The ending, when Billy Butcher reveals what his real, devilishly clever plan was. The links to Gen V. Homelander's slowly successful corruption of Ryan. Ashley's cold betrayal of the ex-sub whoi dumped her, framimg him and ensuring his horrible death. Seeing Stan Edgar again, and his commentary on everyone. Firecracker really going all out to destroy Annie.

And yet there's real heart here. Frenchie's terrible guilt, and Catholic guilt at that, over all the muders he's committed... and what it spurs him to do. 

But the real, incredible, heart-wrenching tragedy here is, of course, Hughie and his dad, with a tour de force performance from Simon Pegg. The dynamics between Hughie and both his parents here is utterly incredible. 

And yet, even here, there's glorious amounts of gore. Ah, The Boys. Like nothing else on telly, and I love it so much.

Douglas Is Cancelled: Episode 3

 "You do want the job, don't you...?"

Wow. This is a sudden, effective and blatantly deliberate shift of tone from the previous two epidsodes. And it's incredible.

The whole episode is a flashback to Madeleine's past, her first meeting with Douglas... and how she got the job. By the end, we pretty much know what Douglas said at the wedding, and how utterly unforgiveable it was.. And that isn't even the point.

The vast majority of the episode is a two hander between Madeline and Toby. Ben Miles is excellent but Karen Gillan is utterly sublime, playing the discomfort, fear and resignation of a woman who, despite her poise, despite being wise to the gaslighting, The script is outstanding here, showing us the horrible reality of #MeToo as experienced in reality by so many women. So many nuances are there in the script. The gaslighting, the power imbalance, the sheer horror.

And, in the end, Douglas opens the door, sees what Madeline is going through... and advises her, in those words we've heard before, that whatever she has to wade through, it's worth it.

Wow. This isn't the type of first class television I was expecting after the first two episodes. But it's certainly first class television.

The Batman (2022)

 "It's all connected."

While the later films didn't quite manage to maintain the excellence, one would perhaps naturally assume that Christopher Nolan had perfected the Batman film back in 2005 with Batman Begins. Yet it would seem not. We have a new contender.

So why is this film so good? Wisely, it skips the origin story and, notably, focuses on a very realistic portrayal of Gotham, with zero supernatural or sci-fi elements. The film is superbly and stylistically shot. Robert Pattinson is perfect as Bruce Wayne, while Zoe Kravitz and Jeffrey Wright also excel.

The use of villains is also excellent. This is a brilliant way of using the Riddler, while Penguin is toned down to become a mere mob boss, no doubt to appear again. The character of Selina Kyle is very well written indeed.

Yet this is at root a crime film very much reminiscent of the Saw franchise and not only in its visual style. Not necessarily in terms of the tiresomely excessive gore but the elements of those films that were actually good- the dark, almost hopeless feeling that violent, corruption and despair are ever-present, and the complex, multi-layered mystery, something which works supremely well here and makes everything feel very fresh indeed.

Yet what works even better is the way the Riddler is reinvented in the vein of Jigsaw, as a crusader for truth. Even better, there's a thread of Gotham having dark secrets in its past, which is used to comment wryly on the extremely harmful conspiracy theory online culture that exists today. It makes the point, rightly, that conspiracy theories are not mere harmless fun.

I hope this film is the first of several. It certainly seems to be setting things up for the future. Overall, though, this film is a triumph..

Downtime

 "I thought I was in Cromer..."

I know: still suffering Doctor Who withdrawal.

This is another one of those curious oddities from, ahem, "the Wilderness Years", as we Doctor Who fans call the '90s. I saw Shakedown not long ago, I enjoyed it despite its endearing flaws, so I thought I'd watch this. Any good?

Well... no. I mean, on paper, it seems good. Filmed on location, a sequel to The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear, loads of old actors and characters. And yet...

The direction is flat. Marc Platt's script has it's character moments and lots of nice metatextual lines, but it's a mess. There's a heavy focus on Victoria, with Deborah Watling being very good, and a welcome appearance from her real life father Jack Watling as Professor Travers. Nick Courtney is superb, as ever, as the Brig, and has a nice little family subplot. And, yeah, this is totally why UNIT today is led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.

Yet Elisabeth Sladen, despite being very good, is woefully underused as Sarah Jane Smith, and there's a little too much going on. And, despite some good character stuff, the plot is very muddled and oddly paced. And yes... inevitably, the whole thing looks very cheap.

This is an interesting curiosity, perhaps, and far from terrible, with very real good points. But it's not exactly great, sadly.

Douglas Is Cancelled: Episode 2

 "They execute gay people and it won't stop raining!"

Two episodrs in... and this is wonderful. Rain in Dubai, the crap comedy writer, the awkwardness between Toby and the taxi driver. But mostly, it's the wit, and the characters. Oh, the characters.

Madeline is much more centtre stage this time. We get to see first hand how she manipulates Douglas. On this occasion he's gone in there all cross and about to demand she remove the tweet... and she gets him to retweet it. But the whole thing is a kind of fight over Douglas between Madeline and Sheila, both of whom want to prep him for the interview he's going to have to endure soon... and then we end with Madeline dropping that bombshell. She's an utterly fascinating character, with far more depth to her than initially meets the eye, and so much cleverer than everyone else.

This is masterful storytelling, and halfway through the series we still don't know what Douglas' joke actually was. But the whole thing is engrossing. The entire cast shines, but Karen Gillan, Alex Kingston and Ben Miles are utterly superb. The real star, though, is the script. Steven Moffat can sooo do comedy thst makes you think.#

Is it me, or is Douglas inexorably headed towards absolute doom?

The Boys: Wisdom of the Ages

 "Your life is literally in your hands..."

Wow, This is a dark, dark episode. For a start, much of it consists of Homelander slowly torturing, humiliating and killing those who made his childhood so damaging. It's all good character stuff... but damn, it's dark.

But so is everything else. Sage has her own demons, unable to be free from the burden of her genius. So much so... that she gets her toyboy the Deep to give her a te,porary fontal lobotomy so she can dumb down for a while.Wow. And that's only the second grossest moment in this episode. The worst is... you know.

Then there's the dying Butcher, the little worm that's roaming in his skin, and that... explosion or something that saves his life. Frenchie finally confesses to Colin. Hughie does his ultimaterly fruitless little deal with A-Train... and what's happening with his Dad?

And yet... the most distressing part of the episode is how cruelly Firecracker (who at one point say to Sage "You know, when I first met you, I thought you were kind of uppity. But you're one of the good ones"... just wow) ruins Annie's life on television via a six hour hatchet job. Liberals are always held to higher moral standards than fascists, because we have morals and they don't. The asymmetry explains why they succeed, and why we must sometimes compromise on our ethics in order to crush them.

This is darker, more of a downer, than most episodes. But, as ever, besides the grossness and the cynicism is a real moral outrage.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

I watched an episode or two of the television series many years ago... but hesitated. Should I not read the novels first? And so, during the Coronavirus plague, I started on the first novel, began to enjoy it... and alas, could not continue, as life was simply too overwhelming and would not stop.

Now, finally, I've read the first novel and oooooh... I see exactly why these novels are so revered. George R.R. Martin has produced a fictionalised mediaeval world that feels real, characters whom one feels one knows, and prose in which to get drunk. Reading this novel is a rich and fulfilling experience, and I have many more to go... possibly with a final novel to go unritten, but for now, I care not. 

Martin is, I suppose, an epic fantasy equivalent of Patrick O'Brian, of yetbeyond his genre. His setting, the continent of Westeros, has the sense of deep history that Middle Earth does, as the book takes us from a loose kingdom united under a week king to a state of utter chaos and civil war, and does so via chapers that each focus on the viewpoint of a single character, all with their own view, desires and quirks.

The situation is, I suppose, similar to the Wars of the Roses, yet there is no exact parallel: one cannot say that the very unpleasant "King" Joffrey is wholly based on Edward IV, for example. The fantasy elements are kept light, yet- at the ending especially- they are there. One cannot help but feel that, as Caetlyn fears, the men of Westeros will cause so much death and destruction fighting each other.... and we know, as she does not, that Danaerys is waiting.

Exquisite.

I plan to alternate A Song of Ice and Fire with another novel until I've finished. So, a shorter novel next. Then A Clash of Kings...

Douglas Is Cancelled: Episode 1

 "That's not ambiguity.That's plausible deniability."

Yes, I know, I've sort of had to temporarily pause my ongoing series that I'm blogging in order to frantically catch up with The Boys after three episodes bloody landed at once. Now ITV have gone and released a new comedy drama by Steven Moffat, so my schedule lies even more in tatters. Grr.

I must say, though, this first episode is bloody brilliant. The premise seems very ho-hum and meh: a news presenter is overheard telling a sexist joke at a wedding and suddenly his career is in the balance. At first glance it looks as though we're in for a tiresome, heavy-handed rant about "cancel culture"... but of course, not.This is Steven Moffat, and he's much cleverer than that.

What's particularly clever is the actual joke itself is held back. It's "Schrodinger's joke". We end the episode on tenterhooks not kmnowing how bad it is or how bad things are.

Hugh Bonneville is excellent as the eponymous Douglas, and so is Karen Gillan as his subtly clever co-host Madeline. But utterly standout performances from Ben Miles as the most cynical producer, and Alex Kingston as the gloriously weary Sheila, utterly steal the show. This is clever, witty, topical (we get lines like "I work with people who hack your phone") and very thoughtful comedy drama. I'm hooked.

This Above All (1942)

 "A man ,must have integrity..."

This is another British war film, reasonably obscure despite starring Joan Fontaine, and a fascinating snapshot of the age.

It is, I suppose, a wartime romance on the surface. And the performances and characterisation are excellent. Yet at its core it's far more philosophical- about the ethics of war, of duty, of what's being fought for- in a way which could only have emerged in the middle of the Second World War.

Prue is a young, aristocratic lady who scandalises her rich family by joining the WAAF... as a private, despite her upbringing, wanting to do her part, frustrated by the stuffy life of privilege she sees around her by those who see the War as an inconvenient intrusion on their comforts. Clive, meanwhile, is a brave soldier, Dunkirk hero, mentioned in dispatches... yet AWOL and on the brink of desertion not from cowardice but disillusion with the privileged nonentoities whom he percieves to be in charge.

The narrative plays out as the well-done melodrama that it is, with a happy ending after many twists and turns. Yet what lingers most about this film, aside from the very contemporary attitude towards pre-marital sex, is that yes, the message is one of patriotism, of duty, of honour. But it is also a film, pointing forwards to the 1945 election, that Britain has come together for the war and so must never again go back to the old ways of privilege, poverty and a nation divided.

This film is no more than quite good, I suppose. But it's a fascinating snapshot of the age.

Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans

 "Called himself the Physician, or the Dentist, or something..."

The new season of Doctor Who is over. I need something for the withdrawal symptoms, really rather urgently.

This is another of those fan-made, straight to video dramas made during Doctor Who's "wilderness years". Made on a shoestring by fans, they were nevertheless fascinating. Often featuring actors from the show, as well as other British telefantasy series such as Blake's 7, they varied in quality, in truth. Many of those fans making them would go on to greater things, though, and for what they were- and their minuscule budgets- they were very impressive.

This, which I've now seen for the first time, is undoubtedly one of the best.

The script, from ever-reliable Terrance Dicks, is genuinely witty and full of twists and turns. The Sontarans here are supremely designed, wtritten and acted, coming across as a very three-dimesnsional species. The Rutans are used well, with surprisingly good effects.

And while the performances are variable, Brian Croucher truly stands out. So does Carole Ann Ford, playing a much deeper and interesting character than Susan ever was. 

Location shooting on HMS Belfast, and creative use of camerawork, makes this look far less cheap than it doubtless was. It's not quite a prodessional production and that shows in places- it looks as though the performances are not always well directed. Yet, with a very strong script at its core, this is a highly impressive piece of work.

The Boys: We'll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here

 "Elon Musk has more charm than he does. And she's half-android."

This episode proves that, good as the last two were, it's possible to get even better. Such a brilliant, perfect, nuanced piece of television.

There's all kinds of very contemporary subtext here, with Vought and its cronies pushing superheroes as a far right wedge issue. There's a man with a gun who nearly murders some of Starlight's followers because of a crazy, Pizzagate-style conspiracy theory. There's a nod to the concerning transphobia epidemic that's rife today, Sister Sage's sinister Project 25-style plans include plans to remove all books covering "critical Supe theory" and allowing Supes to outrank the police and military. Brr.

Yet the character stuff is deep. Hughie finally gets to see his errant mother as a real human being, who left her child not becaudse of innate evil but because it was the only way to save herself folloeing a suicide attempt caused by post-partum depression. Wow. Sister Sage and Firecracker join the Seven... and, very cleverly, after we've come to realise what a nasty, MAGA piece of work Firecracker is, the rug gets pulled out from under us: she genuinely comes from nothing, and had her life chances ruined by thirteen year old little rick girl Annie... and "People don't change". Wow.

Meanwhile, Kimiko realises she has to face her past and overcome her deomons, while Frenchie refuses to share about him, retreating into getting high, having to face not only that he's killed Colin's family but has murdered so many. It's interesting to see where they're going with this. M.M. struggles with leadership, the new Black Noir struggles with his acting, and the Deep has a love triangle going on with Sage and, er, an octopus.

But the real meat of the episode is the tug of war between an increasingly scary Homelander and the dying Butcher for Ryan. Butcher and Ryan have a truly affecting scene, Ryan clearly seeing Butcher asa flawed, damaged but ultimately good man. Homelander, meanwhile, is casually leaving a trail of human bodies behind him... but what't that multiple personality moment at the end? He has to go "back to the start?"

As ever with The Boys, I've no idea where this is going. But I bleeding well love it.

The Boys: Life Among the Septics

" I swear to God... stupod people who think they're smart make me want to eat my own ***."

Yet again, there's a lot going on here, early in the season though we are. Sister Sage continues to be fascinating- the smartest person on the planet and utterly amoral. She has ber own agenda too, and we start to see parts of it. Despite her obvuous disdain for the subtle racism directed at her, she is ultimately a supe supremacist, telling the Deep to stand up to Ashley because "You're an evolutionarily superior being."

Ironically, she's an interesting comparison to Stormfront and, in the end, similarly fascistic. It's just that her racism is less... old-fashioned. And Homelander quite agrees. Much of the episode consists of Ryan prepping for his first "Solo save" in public, which goes horribly wrong as the "villain" is horribly killed by Homelander. Chillingly, Homelander just doesn't get why Ryan is upset about this- "humans are fragile".

Horrifying though this is, it shows a horrible truth: superheroes never truly save anyone, it's all staged... as A-Train is forced to admit to his nephews. Meanwhile, he's filming his own origin movie which is changing his past to include all sorts of subtly racist tropes... and Will Ferrell. No wonder he's annoyed enough to sneak footage exonerating last episode's two murder scapegoats to Annie and Hughie.

Meanwhile, Kimiko gets drunk, continues to be lovely to Frenchie and maybe, just maybe, confronts her own past. Hughie, meanwhile, confronts his errant mother. And the ongoing psychodrama between M.M. and the dying Butcher continues.

Best of all, as ever, is the social commentary- the subtle and not so subtle racism of MAGA America, and the dangers of conspiracy theories, which are far from harmless and all have dangeroud far right ideology not far beneath the surface. Ah, I love The Boys. I just need to get bleeding well caught up.

Doctor Who: Empire of Death

 “Is this thing safe?”

“Absolute deathtrap, Melanie B.”

I was going to do a separate blog post for the Tales of the TARDIS thing for Pyramids of Mars but, well, there’s not much to it. We have some extra Egypt stock footage, some mildly redone effects, and a very short prologue and epilogue with the Doctor and Ruby wonder what the Dickens they’re going to do about Sutlekh. He’s unstoppable, he’s evolved into a “titan”… and that’s it. Presumably it takes place at some point during the episode in that remembered TARDIS while Mel is off doing something?

So on to the episode itself. I watched it at 7am this morning. Since then I’ve had a 200 mile drive and a day spent in full-on dad mode. I’m aware, as hours have passed, that opinion seems to be divided, much as I’ve tried to avoid others’ thought until I’ve blogged mine. Yet I can see how this episode could be fairly criticised: Sutekh destroys all life in the universe, is defeated by a clever trick, everyone is brought back to life with the press of a reset button, and Ruby’s mum was a massive red herring.

And yet… for me, the emotional and storytelling beats were fantastic. I bloody loved this finale. So let’s get into why. This may take a while.

We begin with what at first seems to be the destruction of UNIT with Sutekh’s Dust of Death- Kate Lethbridge-Stewart’s death is played like a big, stoic, dramatic moments and packs a punch. Yet it’s soon clear that the dust is spreading across London. The Doctor, Ruby and Mel escape in the TARDIS… and they can see, through the TARDIS doors, as the dust covers the whole planet. Earth is utterly sterilised. Other than them, there will soon be no one.

We get an interesting scene with Cherry and Mrs Flood, who seemed so creepy last episode but, if you recall, I suspected she may turn out to be an example of the creepy red herring trope- the apparently sinister character who turns out to be benevolent. I see nothing here to change my mind. Mrs Flood sees what’s coming, sighs, says she had “such plans” and hugs Cherry as both become dust. It’s a fascinating scene. And one which suggests to me that, whoever Mrs Flood is, and we may or may not like her agenda… but she’s no Big Bad.

We get some exposition from Sutekh, Gabriel Woolf still sounding spellbounding at ninety-one years of age. It seemed Sutekh hitched a ride on the TARDIS back in 1911 and has been there ever since, slowly setting a trap, the TARDIS now his forever. Yet somehow, very much light shaded by the Doctor, Sutekh seems to be sparing Ruby, Mel and himself.. why? It may all feel a little neat, but all of this is utterly compelling.

So they escape in the TARDIS from the reconstruction of that night on Ruby Road… a “remembered TARDIS”. Is this the explanation for what we see in Tales of the TARDIS? Because I still don’t understand how it all fits together, but no matter.

What does matter is that it isn’t just Earth, it’s everywhere: dead, sterile, lifeless. The Doctor speaks of Venus; Telos; Karen: the Ood Sphere; Skaro. Everywhere and every when the Doctor has visited, dead because he visited. An unbearable weight on anyone’s conscience: “I thought it was fun.” Ncuti Gatwa plays the Doctor’s anguish with such exquisite force. 

Millie Gibson is quite wonderful in this sequence, but do is Bonnie Langford, who really gets material to make Mel shine as she never could way back when, and rises with aplomb to the opportunity.

It all comes back to Ruby’s mother, the all-powerful secret that Sutekh wants. It seems he’s won, but this is his downfall. This… and a spoon. The scene of the Doctor and the poor forgetful lady in the tent who has somehow survived longer … yes, there’s subtext here that I’m not getting, isn’t there?

Yet the Doctor has a spoon… and we get some more exposition and unexpected references to 73 Yards. I’m not sure any of that episode’s ambiguities are explained, beyond the significance of that distance, but nor did they need to be. The secret of Ruby’s birth mother is found, while Mel becomes a horrifying looking servant of Sutekh. All looks bleak.. until the Doctor’s plan unfolds. It’s deeply satisfying, earned, and hits all the emotional beats, including the Doctor’s regret at having no choice but to kill Sutekh. And yes, everyone is resurrected… but the emotional beats are exquisite. And it all happened. 

That Ruby’s mum is just normal is… perfect. Ordinary, good but flawed people are as important as powerful godlike beings. And the scenes where Ruby finds and gets to know her birth mother are… utterly wonderful.

And so, with this all going on, the Doctor leaves for a while. He promises Ruby he’ll be back. He tends not to do this… but this time we believe him.

Oh, and Ruby’s parting words to the Doctor are “I love you”. Oh RTD, you give us the feels in ways Chibnall never could.

And we end… with a narration from a rather different Mrs Flood- her true self, whoever she is? To be continued, clearly. All else for this season is wrapped up: Mrs Flood is for next year. And all is foreboding…

This is television with heart, scares, thrills, all the things we’ve missed for so long. I loved every second of this.

The Boys: The Department of Dirty Tricks

 "You know, there were no relations with an octopus..."

Ouch. Three new episodes of The Boys dropped last Friday, showing zero respect for my schedule. Bear with me; I'mll get them watched and up to date as soon as I can, even if it means watching episodes on some consecutive days.

It's been a while, hasn't it? I've missed The Boys. This season opener may not have an... explosive moment like the last one, but damn, it's good. So good, in fact, that it even deserves to be bookended by a certain suddenly outdated stone cold classic by the Sex Pistols. But who are the flowers in the dustbin, and who the poison in the human machine, if I may further torture some already tortured metaphors?

So... Homelander, a scarily powerful and unhinged figure idolised by fanatical far right supporters, is undergoing a criminal trial. Meanwhile, a new president has been elected... and is trying to get the CIA, employing the Boys, to kill his vice-preseident, one Victoria Neumann, before January 6th and the inauguration, thereby altering the result of the election. Isn't it great to have such pure superhero escapism, which in no way reflects current events?

Most of the gang see Vicky (and her very, very scary daughter with some truly icky powers) as the main threat... but the slowly dying Billy Butcher is highly focused on Homelander. And they're sort of both right, althgough thankfully not yet in conflict; it seems that Butcher is about to betray Hughie and ally with Neumann against Homelander... but he doesn't.

Hughie's dad has a stroke. Homelander is having a mid-life crisis and is tired of being surrounded by sycophants (ha!)... yet he bonds with Sister Sage, whose superpower is genius... and follows her deliciously evil, utterly amoral plan.Right down to having his biggest fans beaten to death by three of said sycophants for a false flag op. Ouch.

And it seems Black Noir is not quite dead after all?)

The arc with Ryan isfascinating... will he choose Billy or Homelander? Frenchie has an old flame, Colin. Already, there's so much going on. As ever, this is soooo good.

Better Call Saul: Magic Man

 "Doesn't that sound like you're envouraging people to commit crimes?"

We begin the season- as we haven't for a while- in the monochrome present, in Nebraska, as the artist formerly known as Jimmy continues his life of constant worry and looking over his shoulder, miserable, with nothing to look forward to. We continue in this vein until, suddenly... he's recognised by someone from New Mexico. So what to do? Yet another new life (from the same bloke and the same actor!) would be far too expensive... so he's going to take matters into his own hands.The whole sequence takes thirteen minutes, and only then do the titles kick in.

This is exciting, to say the least. For every other plot thread, we know roughly how things are going to pan out. That Jimmy is going to practise as Saul Goodman, that Gus is going to win out over Lalo, that Kim was nowhere to be seen in Breaking Bad. But for this, in the "present"... this is uncharted territory. It seems this part of the show may get more prominent.

And yet so many more plot treads, potential season arcs, are beginning to unfurl. Nacho, having thought he'd won, now has to contend with Lalo. And Lalo is a problem for Gus too, who is on the back foot in relation to him, and can't overtly act against Lalo without annoying Don Eladio. But Gus is Gus, and it's clear he intends to kill Lalo... an arc for this season?

Interestingly, there's a comment about Gus. he's competent, he gets results, but he's "not one of us". Subtle racism?

Then there's Jimmy, setting up as Saul Goodman to the existing criminal clientele to whom he's been selling phones... and he is, as ever, quite the successful salesman. Kim, of course, being a real lawyer, can't understand what he's up to, and it seems the rift will grow... and yet, at the end, she is again seduced by his tricks despite hereself.

Most interestingly... Mike sends away Werner's very scared crew, and when Kai states that Wener had it coming... he gets hit for his troubles. And yet, when another German tells Mike that Werner was worth fifty of him... Mike lets it slide. Ouch. There even seems to be a rift developing between him and Gus.

Already, this season is sizzling, with so much going on. At last, we really feel as though the world we experienced with Walter White is not too far away. Superb television, as ever.

Carry On Spying (1964)

 "Stop messin' about..."

I keep thinking I'm still quite early on in my chronological journey through the Carry On films, but I'm further along than I's thought. This is the last of the films to be shot in black and white, but the humour is by now real Carry On innuendo... andat last we lave the lovely and wonderful Barbara Windsor, doing as she always does.

We have Bernard Cribbins again, for the last time, and surprisingly few of the usual faces. Charles Hawtrey is... well, Charles Hawtrey, while Kenneth Williams stars. Interestingly, though, Williams isn't his usual Carry On persona here, being much more the "stop messin' about" persona that contemporary audiences would remember from Hancock's Half Hour on the wireless.

And... it's perfectly entertaining, giving us exactly what we want from a fairly standard Carry On. It's riffing on the spy genre but not, as one might have expected in 1964, with a great focus on James Bond, although Dr Claw is blatantly a pastiche of a Bond villain and we get a little riff on the train scene from From Russia with Love. We also get an extended sequence in Vienna riffing off The Third Man, complete with zither, and another extended sequence in Algiers where we're presented with some vaguely orientalist stereotypes which, er, haven't aged well. Fakirs, beds of nails, snake charmers... in Algeria?!

Like all Carry Ons, this is as much a fascinating little time capsule as an entertaining little comedy- I particularly noticed a random fruit machine with an unexpected Sega logo, which I suspect is not something often mentioned in connection with this film.

Overall, thoiugh, a splendid romp. And I'm about to enter the peak Carry On period...

Doctor Who: The Legend of Ruby Sunday

 "I am in Hell..."

Needless to say, this is going to be a long one.

It's sort of fasionable within fandom, and indeed within fandoms, to prefer the good, unusual quirky episodes to the big, two-part season finales with Big Things happening. I'm quite of that school of thought myself. But let's not pretend here: there's room for both, and I, for one, love a big season finale.

And this episode is very no nonsense about what it is. It advertises, from the start, that this is an episode about Big Things. Bang bang bang, one after another. The Doctor and Ruby arrive at UNIT! Ruby's meeting them for the first time! Rose and Kate! That robot thingy's had an upgrade! And, er, there's this bizarre child genius figure about whom the less said the better, but never mind.

And there's exactly zero faffing about as the episode hones in on the arc stuff, starting with this mysterious woman whose face has been following the Doctor and Ruby around all season. She's a big computer tycoon, very famous... and her company, S Triad, is an acronym of TARDIS, while her first name is Susan. And this in a season where the Doctor's perennially ankle-spraining grandaughter has alreadsy been mentioned. Could it be...?

I love the quip from Kate about how UNIT are always stopping evil software geniuses with alien tech "excelpt him, obviously". Hah. But again, it's zero faffing about as we get straight on to the mysterious origins of Ruby back at that church on Ruby Road that Christmas Eve, as UNIT set to try and solve the mystery with the help of impossibly advanced tech, technobabble and, er, a video tape. I'm not sure why UNIT is happy to use its resources, no doubt expensively, to do this... but never mind. This is season finale logic, and I'm enjoying the ride.

And, of course, Carla needs to be along for the ride too. Which means her mother needs looking after, by our old friend Mrs Flood. Except... as soon as the two of them are left alone together, Mrs Flood starts to act all sinister, stating that "He waits no more".... yep. It's the One Who Waits.

But... and please do indulge me here: I say this totally unspoiled. But could Mrs Flood be that trope that's the hilariously sinister red herring who is actually not a baddie at all? I'm aware, of course- and this is jumping ahead a bit- that she could be Susan,but it would be cool if Susan herself were just a bit of misdirection, although perhaps to be followed up next season?

Anyway, digressions aside... we see a reconstruction of that night, with Ruby's birth mum being an uncanny, hooded figure whose face cannot be seen. Yet she points at the observing Doctor, memories and even video footage change, and there's a deeply creepy, malign presence that horribly kills the poor redshirt, obviously doomed though he was. I love the brief look of disgust Kate gives the Doctor. This is his fault.UNIT are doing all this only to indulge the Doctor, and they lose one of their own.

So what of the mysterious Susan Triad? The Doctor is paired here with the delightful Mel- Bonnie Langford is quite, quite wonderful- who is far better written here than she ever was as a companion. There are even hints of a backstory ("I lost my family to the most terrible things...")... and it's clear that Susan Triad is not who we thought she was. The reveal- another harbinger, the "wrong anagram"- is deeply effective... we get a bit of horrifying exposition of the Pantheon- the Toymaker, the Trickster, the Maestro, the Mara, some others... and, atop them all...

Sutekh. And they've only bloody gone and got Gabriel Woolf.

I suspect this won't make much sense on a second viewing. I don't particularly care. The storytelling beats were exquisite and had me on the edge of my seat. I LOVED this.

Batman: The Animated Series- Christmas with the Joker

 "Jingle bells, Batman smells..."

I love that they use the opening to the version of Jingle Bells I ised to sing in primary schools, even if the rest of the words are different. This is our first introduction to Mark Hamill's Joker (and Arkham Asylum), and it's perfect.

Batman has always been perfect for splendidly dark Christmas tales, and this is no exception. Oh, the plot is straightforward enough, and bonkers, as the Joker dangerously toys with Batman on Christmas Day. It reminds me of those Steve Englehart stories from the '70s which themselves riffed on the early Joker tales. This is very typical Joker stuff, exactly what you want as an introduction.

Incidentally, we now have Robin, after he wasn't in the first episode. Is this the plan, to sometimes feature the character and sometimes not? And which Robin is this? I can't quite recall if Tim Drake was a thing in 1992, but I'm sure all will slowly be revealed. I love the banter between the two of them over Christmas and It's a Wonderful Life.

All very impressive stuff- and very "trad" post-1970 Denny O'Neill revamp Batman in a way which hadn't actually be seen on screen before this. It's fadcinating to see this series unfold.

The Last Sect (2006)

"Once you join us you'll see this isn't a Heaven you have to suffer to enter..."

I don't mind a good bad film. Bad films can be enormous fum, as all right-thinking people know. No: there is no sin but being boring. And crikey, this films- about good looking, vaguely kinky female vampires, for Pete's sake is oh, so desperately and soul crushingly dull.

So what went wrong? No one sets out to make a bad film, after all. And it is, at least, interesting, to see the very 2006 attitudes to the internet and to online dating, by no means an accepted thing at that point, as well as mild social commentary about the dating experience for women and for men. The cinematography is good, despite the vaguely washed out look which has dated somewhat but I remember at the time being a tiresome trend... but it's done well. The cast, is good by and large. I mean, yes, David Carradine phones in his performance a bit, a wise decision with this script, but he oozes charisma nonetheless. And the soundtrack by the Duke Spirit, something else that's very 2006, is utterly wonderful.

But it's soooo slooow. At first the talkiness is ok. But the characters, who are dull anyway, just talk and talk and nothing ever happens. Yes, the film looks good, but that's because the set oieces are kept to a minimum, there doesn't seem to be any location filming, and it's ninety minutes of exposition and talking and talking and talking and oh my god hw much longer do I have to try to concentrate. We're talking possibly the dullest lesbian kiss in cinematic history here.

I can't think of any reason whatsoever why anybody would want to put themselves through tfhis ilm. I beseech you: don't suffer as I did.

The Dogs of War (1980)

 "He wants to be God. I want to be rich!"

I was expecting this film to be rather more similar to Day of the Jackal- after all, both films are based on Frederick Forsyth novels of a similar ilk, focusing on the fascinating process of organising an assassination and a coup, respectively. Yes, Forsyth is a reactionary old git, but I did enjoy reading his novels in my teens. Basic, functional prose, zero charactersation, all plot, but somewhat unputdownable as potboilers go.

It's fair to say that this film is a different beast from Day of the Jackal. It omits the best bits of the novel- the planning of the coup, the details of how the sausage is made- and is, more or less, whilea faithful adaptation on the whole, much more of a very straightforward action film starring a very young Christopher Walken and helmed by the future director of Raw Deal.

As such... it's fine. Walken isdecent, as ever, but I've  always found him to be precisely that- decent, competent, but lacking in anything deeper than that. Colin Blakely is rather good, but none of the supporting cast stand out, and the big action scene at the end is rather dull. 

I suppose the earlier scenes where Shannon, and the viewer, explore the realitiesof a poor African dictatorship, hold some interest but, well, are we perhaps in an area of rather dodgy stereotyping? This film is largely fine, it's decent enough, but a far better adaptation of the novel could potentially have been made.

Doctor Who: Rogue

 "Just try not to get engaged, or accidentally invent tarmac".

My, Doctor Who is very metatextual these days.

Another bloody good episode this week. Oh, it didn't quite hit the higghs of last week or the week before, but that's frankly a high bar to reach. This was a bloody good bit of television.

It's also an episode written by someone not a Doctor Who showrunner, which is nice. Indeed, Kate Herron and Briony Redman are not only new to the show but have no connection to the fandom that I know of... and are, you know, a nice break from the testosterone. I know of Kate Herron as director of both Sex Education and Loki... and, whilst she doesn't seem to have writing credits for the latter, she apparently did a bit of showrunning. This is excellent: Loki is by far the best of the Disney Plus Marvel telly stuff.

Anyway, it's Regency England in 1813. "Oh my Bridgerton" indeed, as all the Jane Austen tropes are nicely deconstructed from the first scene, which gives us a nice little teaser to what'ds going on, as a Regency fop decides the man with him is a bounder and a cad... so he takes over his identity and kills him. Lovely.

It all looks wonderful, although I'm sure those who are upset by such things will complain about the presence of the occasional actor who has the temerity to not be white.Ruby gets to explore all the Jane Ausen stuff, while the Doctor meets, and flirts with, the mysterious Rogue, a bounty hunter who is mysterious, plays D&D(!), and is a rather convenient source of exposition as to what's going on- it's shape shifting aliewns, of course.,The two of them get on famously, despite Rogue committing the social faux pas of trying to kill a man on the first date. No doubt thosewho love to complain about such things will moan about the fact that, by this point, we pretty clearly have a Doctor coded as gay. Meh. People have sexual orientations. It's a mundane fact of life.

Rogue's invisible ship is a bit Shada, and Susan Twist is a portrait this time, but otherwise there's a total lack of continuity references, which is pleasing, a sign of new writing blood and proof that the show need not feel the need to reference its past every five minutes... much though I love it when that does happen. It's complicated.

The Doctor and Rogue are really getting on. The Doctor invites Rogue to travel with him, they almost kiss, and... yeah, it's clear at this point that he's doomed in some way. But the big reveal is delightfully metatextual: the alien shape shifters are cosplaying. And, I'm sure, no doubt there will e conventions in the coming months with fans cosplaying as them. Deliciously, the aliens behave like fans, complete with their "season finale".

The bit of cruel misdirection at the end, making us believe Ruby is dead, is well done, as is Rogue's heroism. He's more than a bounty hunter... and we get a nice hint that he may be returning. I love the Doctor's reaction to his broken heart, too: he's been there so many times, and just wants to go onwards... but Ruby, lovely as she is, insists on a proper hug. And rightly so.

But what truly makes this episode shine is the wit of the script and the delightful metatextualism of its ideas. I can't believe the season is nearly over. Can't it go on forever?

The Sweeney: Night Out

 "Wait, where's my gun?"

"In the dishwasher?"

This is another subtle little character episode from the pen of none other than Troy Kennedy Martin. On the surface it's about Regan keeping an old flame, Iris, in her flat next to a pub while a Superindendent and his gang carry out an operation to grab the villains doing a job in the vault of the bank next to the pub next door. There's suspense. There's shootout. There's realistic fear from Regan.

And yet... this is really about the people. Jack's old flame is... nice, witty, likeable. You can see why Jack liked her. And, despite an awkward start, you can see their chemistry.As real people often do, they fall apart through circumstances but crisiscan bring back the old affections...and so Irisand Jack end up in bed together. Twice. With lots of rather glorious screwball comedy for good measure.

Yet it's also a fascinating character study of T.P. McKenna's Superintendent, a man who loves success, loves publicity and is admired by his men, seduced by the glamour... yet it's all about him, and he cares not how many get hurt, or killed, in the attempt. John Thaw plays contempt for this man to perfection. The suspense at the end is electric. At one point I thought Iris would be the one being shot.

Not the best episode so far, perhaps, but only because of the high quality of the others. And I love the casual response to the bar fight as "Well, I suppose it's Saturday night, innit?"

Batman: The Animated Series- On Leather Wings

 "I only toss butlers, Alfred..."

And so it begins.

I'm watching these in production order, as I'm, reliably informed the broadcast order ill all over trhe place. I'll do a season for now, then see how it goes, but it has to ber said this is quite my period. It's 1992, before Bane and Azrael and Tim Drake and whatnot: I know the lore pretty well at this point.

And you know what? This is excellent stuff. Confession time: I started watching the first episode of the '90s X-Men cartoon some months ago in preparation for X-Men '97, and, despite my fond memories... it was bloody awful. I may or may not try again at some point. But this, at least, is superb.

The plot is straightforward- a mysterious bat-like figure is stealing pharmaceuticals and the police blame Batman, but it's actually Man-Bat. Simple. But simple is needed, as this is the first episode and we only have twenty-two minutes to tell the story. We 're introduced tothe early '90s, slightly acerbic Bruce-Alfred dynamic. Commissioner Gordon is world-weary, plagued by politics and the delightfully annoying Harvey Bullock... and then there's a brief glimpse of the district attorney, one Harvey Dent, whom I'm sure will remain a very... singular fellow.

The characters, the dialogue, the angular animation- all are very good indeed. And it all oozes just enough of the Tim Burton style- the music, the Batmobile design, while being very clearly its own beast. And the title card at the start- it seems inspired by the movie serials.

A necessarily functional start, but a good one. Let's see where this goes.

The Sweeney: Jigsaw

 "He's got the Church and the Palace of Westminster on his side. Who have you got?"

On the surface, this episode is all plot, and very cleverly done. It's not a whodunit, it's a "howdunit". We know Eddie and Eric are the villains what robbed the payroll and coshed the nightwatchman, but they have cast iron alibis- with Regan himself and a vicar respectively. The episode is all about how Regan, with Carter's dogged support, try and ultimately succeed in nailing them despite pressire- including from the local MP- to stop "harrassing" Eddie.

It's all verty clever, centred on character; Eddie's cynical pose as a family man is his downfall. And so it's all tied up neatly.

And yet... this is really a character episode. We're five episodes in. We start to get to know them a little more. So we have Regan confronting Eddie at the school gates, leading to us meeting Carter's wife, who tells him what she thinks of Regain, and she doesn't like him... contrasting with Carter's genuine admiration. Itr's a nice little character moment.

We also see Regan annoyed by Eddie's family man act, cynically using the affections of a child for personal gain... and we learn that this is largely because Regan is divorced, can't see his own daugher, and his ex's new fella is the one who is "there". Ouch.

This series hasn't had a duffepisode yet, and it's slowly getting better and better. And, yet again, it's a fascinating glimpse into a Britain just a few years before my earliest memories.

Doctor Who: Dot and Bubble

 “You’re so good at walking!”

This episode is, obviously, brilliant. I suppose it’s Doctor Who riffing on Unfriended and other films of that ilk, but it’s so more than that, going beyond social media to other menaces of modern society, such as Alexa and other such AI nonsense that you won’t catch me playing around with. So we have a subtext… but this is Doctor Who in 2024. And there’s always a twist at the end.

So it’s the far future, and a bunch of rich, useless young people have been sent off to a colony to be stupid and decadent. They live inside a very literal social media  “bubble” and can’t even walk without an AI telling them where to go, a nicely blatant bit of satire. I know I’m middle aged, and let me pause here to say that, while I don’t play around with this Alexa nonsense, I’m as addicted to my phone as anyone. But, well, like Ricky September, I read books. But I confess to enjoying the skewering of thd younger generation here, oblivious to the fact that massive great gastropods are eating them alive because they literally don’t look where they’re going in their vacuous social media bubble.

Both the Doctor and Millie are restricted in screen time here, so Callie Cooke ably helms the episode as the vacuous Lindy who, we slowly learn, is not only stupid but not a very nice person beneath the surface vacuity and forced jollity.

Her scenes with Ricky September, a pop star who beats his typecasting by actually being a seemingly decent and clever chap who reads books and is brave and heroic (but, well, part of a dodgy society, as we will see- does he share its views, I wonder?), are hilarious examples of the comedy of awkwardness, Lindy utterly oblivious of what someone who didn’t live entirely online would know to be cringeworthy faux pax…

And then she cynically throws him under the bus to save her own skin. Ouch.

And then we have the twist. No, not Susan Twist, although she appears, and gets lampshaded a bit more strongly than in last episode… but the epilogue. The survivors… are white supremacists, and insist on hardship and probable death, useless as they are, rather than escape in a TARDIS owned by a black man. Wow. Cleverly, this puts an awful lot of Lindy’s earlier lines into quite a different context on a second viewing.

That hits hard. It’s fascinating to see RTD address Ncuti Gatwa’s African origins in this way. And, I suppose, the moral is that racism is not just immoral: it is backwards, decadent, weak, a sign of a society that will ultimately lose in the Darwinian struggle to more robust societies.

Wow. It’s been several hours, and the conclusion still hits hard. Three more episodes to go…

Update

 This is just to say there will be no updates this week as I’m in full on dad mode, but I’ll be back with Doctor Who late on Saturday and a normal posting schedule from then onwards.

Doctor Who: 73 Yards

 “Everyone has abandoned me my whole life…”

Let’s just pause to get the praise out of the way before we start: this is a bloody brilliant bit of telly. Now that’s out of the way… yeah, this is going to be a long one. Make yourself comfortable. 

So the Doctor and Ruby land in what’s instantly recognisable as the South Wales cost to we long-running Doctor Who fans. The Doctor briefly mentions a future prime minister from the area, Roger ap Gwilliam, but it’s nicely downplayed, a throwaway remark and not obvious as Chekhov’s gun at this point.

Ruby disturbs an odd little new age shrine thingy… and suddenly the Doctor vanishes, for this is a Doctor-lite story. And suddenly the direction, the cinematography, the texture of the footage itself, suddenly start to look like the best of co temporary horror. And the central conceit is utter genius: a ghostly old female figure always follows Ruby, staring exactly seventy-three yards away. Others can approach her, but not Ruby… and when others approach, they run. This is deeply creepy and possibly the best horror idea ever in Doctor Who, in terms of both idea and execution.

Of course, I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of the Watcher in Logopolis…

Anyway, we soon meet a hiker lady, played by Susan Twist, who was the AI ambulance last episode but, in hindsight, has played an awful lot of bit parts recently. And Ruby notices, at this point, that her face is sort of familiar… yeah, definitely a Bad Wolf sort of situation. Who is she? And, while we’re at it, who is Mrs Flood, who briefly appears again? Susan was mentioned last episode- could either of them be her?

There follows a quietly brilliant scene in a local pub where Ruby, at a loss with what to do, meets with an unfriendly reception, being English. Yet there is fault on both sides. The pubgoers are certainly rude, unjustifiably so, but Ruby is also guilty of stereotyping although, perhaps, “racist” is a strong word. I love the prank they play on Ruby about the fairy circle thingy and “Mad Jack”, and all that stuff about the cliff top being a boundary between land and seas and a “liminal space”… the first time that concept has been mentioned in Doctor Who. Oh, and yeah, up until the joke is revealed it’s all bloody terrifying.

It gets worse, of course. Ruby goes home, Carla goes to talk to the figure, runs… and abandons Ruby, shockingly. We get a nice, reassuring cameo with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart… but the same happens with her… although not before, as the explains UNIT to Ruby, complete with its habit of employing ex-companions, as an organisation that deals with extra-terrestrial threats and now also the supernatural as “Things seem to be turning that way these days”. Hmm. Since the Doctor did that thing with the salt in Wild Blue Yonder, perhaps?

Ruby, though, is alone… and the years and decades go by, the figure always there and Ruby never finding happiness, being dumped by boyfriend after boyfriend. It’s an extraordinary direction for the story to go in, much though we sort of know at this point that there’s going to be some sort of reset button.

And so we have the clever resolution. The decades going by and the slightly off near-future feels very Years and Years. But Ruby manages to save the world from a nationalistic nuke -happy maniac by using the figure as a weapon to get Ap Gwilliam to give up. Don’t you think he looks tired?

And so Ruby lives out her sad lovely, life, a life dedicated to saving the world but at a terrible cost to her. No snow, no family, no excitement, no love. And then… the final reveal. The Doctor. And Ruby suddenly has a second chance at life.

I suspect, if you look too closely. There may be the odd little plot inconsistency. I don’t care. This is more than just brilliant. It’s beautiful. 

Carry On Jack (1964)

"And all I get is the scrubbing..."

This is not one of the well-remembered Carry Ons... and there's a reason for that. As with most of the films, it's written by Talbot Rothwell and shot by Gerald Thomas, but... well, it doesnt exactly not feelmlike a Carry On film, but... well, we've had films before with some of the regulars missing, but the only real regulars here are Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey. Bernard Cribbins stars, and he's bloody good... but he's not really "core" Carry On.

That's not to say that this is in any way bad, despite its lack of any truly memorable set pieces. The script is fine, and the directing is more than fine. This is the first historical Carry On, set in the Royal Navy of Nelson's day, and it all looks great. We get all the tropes- mutiny, Spanish Armadas, pirates, walking the plany, the cat o'nine tails, press gangs. It's all good fun. But a lot of the rest of the cast... well, they're competent, but no more than that.

This is a fascinating time capsule into the Britain of sixty years ago, though. There's a fair bit of sexual innuendo here; the franchise has come a long way over its six years so far but at last the '60s have started to swing a bit. Some of the social attitudes have perhaps not aged well. 

Nevertheless, this is, well, by no means a bad film, but it's hardly going to stand out, and it's no wonder that this is one of the more obscure films in the series. Still, in opening up the way to using historical settings, it points the way forward.

The Pledge (1981)

 “There's no peace for a dead man..."

Yes, it’s another old adaptation of an old horror short story tonight- this time it’s The Highwayman, by Lord Dunsany, who comes well recommended by no less a figure than Neil Gaiman. You will find the original story here: this is a fairly straight retelling.

And yet... the plot is hardly the point. The original vignette is all mood, atmosphere, dread. Very little happens, but we feel a kind of existential terror.Soit is with this shorty film, with its grainy cinematography and moody moorlands... and the horrible corpsecswinging on the gallows, decaying more and more with every shot, its lips forever stuck in a cry of pain and its mouth swimming with maggots.

Effectively, we see short scenes from Tom's ill-fated life, of rape, of robbery, of murder.And we hear his death sentence as we see the horrid corpse swing from side to side.

This is twenty short minutes. Yet it's a real triumph of moody, visual horror.

The Sweeney: Queen's Pawn

 "I'm not a gentleman. And I don't like losing."

Oh, I like this episode: hard boiled and clever. It's a simple premise: arch robber Johnny Lyon gets off at court and Regan is given free rein to bring him in by any means necessary, working on his two associates playing clever, amoral mind games- this is personal, and Regan will do absolutely anything. He's a moral man, in a way, but the ends justify the means.

Yes, like other episodes, this is policing from another era, and it's fascinating seeing the nation as it was half a century ago, shortly before I was born. The social mores, the gender roles, the conventions are all subtly different. But the scene where Johnny (Tony Selby is superb here as Regan's ever-more-desperate prey) loses at chess to his lawyer (a typically suave Julian Glover) in a fool's mate serves as a microcosm for the entire episode which consists of Regan playing ten dimensional chess. Even the title is a clever pun- it;s just a matter of which of Johnny's cronies will end as Regan's pawn, and turn queen's evidence.#

The twist at the end is shocking... and Regan's fault. But this is a hard world. One fascinating to watch, if not to live in. And Regan's bosses... such cynical ***s. This is good telly.

Echo: Maya

 "You must not run..."

Well, I suppose this is a satisfying finale. Fisk and his subordinates infiltrate the Choctaw pow wow and he sets out to kill Maya's family asa revenge for her abandoning him, which, wow, and she defeats him by channeling te energy and talents of all her female ancestors, seeded throughout the previous episodes. It work well... but isn't it, well, exactly what we expected to happen?

Still, there are highlights. The flashback to the CGI woodpecker is nice, and the scene with Maya meeting her mother's spirit for a spot of heartwarming exposition is nice. It's cute to see Chula and Skully reconcile and hold hands, and, in the end, Maya reconnects with her family properly. All the character threads are more or less resolved. The visuals of Maya (and Bonnie, and Chula!) being infused with their ancestors' power is pretty damn cool.

And Fisk- Maya seems to try to heal him of those deep seated childhood "cycle of abuse" scars... but perhaps it's simply that such trauma can't be waved away. The Kingpin is who he is and, judging by the mid-credits sequence, he has big plans for New York City.

This is, I suppose, good stuff, well executed. But the plot, for me, was ultimately a little too neat and predictable.

Doctor Who: Boom

 "Keeps you dying. Keeps you buying."

Phew, I've finally seen this, after twenty-four hours of feeling like I'm in that episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? that everybody remembers. This may happen a few more timnes this series but, well, let's just say that Doctor Who may be vastly important, of course it is... but some things matter musch, much, more.

Anyway, Steven Moffat is back and this episode is a thing of wonder. It's very high concept- the Doctor saves himself, Ruby, the Anglican Priests around them and indeed much of the planet- all whuile standing on a landmine and incredibly close to death- and, incidentally, Ncuti Gatwa's performance here, the right, Doctorish type of fear, is acting perfection. Yet, by Disney standards- there's a lot of CGI- this episode, with its small cast and small stakes, feels like it was the season cheapie. But then so was Blink, and, well.

This is Moffat at his very best- not spread thinly as showrunner but able to focus all his Moffaty goodness into forty-four minutes. As we expect, the plot works like clockwork and has a highly satisfying resolution. Yet, in other respects, this is different, and perhaps deeper. And everybody does not live.

It's 3,082 years after Ruby's birth (Late 51st century? Time agents, Boeshane Peninsula and Magnus Greel?) , a timeframe Moffat likes to play with.The Anglican priests are back... but this time there's an attempt to almost explain them with the line that priests not being soldiers isan unusual "blip". There's an ambiguity about religious faith- on the one hand, it can dull sceptical thinking, yet on the other it can comfort- which doubtless reflect's Moffat's own thoughts, an atheist, but certainly not a "New" one.

Yet the central conceit here (SPOILER KLAXON!!!) is deliciously and unashamedly political: an arms corporation that keeps casualties at the most proftable level, and a war against a phantom enemy purely so that said corporations can supply weapons. The ultimate end result of unregulated corporate greed run amok. 

There's not much arc stuff here- Villengard and the Anglican soldier priests aside, both Moffat creations of old- but we get that snow with Ruby again: all very "Bad Wolf". And it's good to see Varada Sethu from Andor. But sometimes a good standalone episode, or indeed a great one such as this, is just what the Doctor ordered.

The Sweeney: Thin Ice

 "I merely strangled the hound with my bare hands..."

This is the best episode yet. Oh, the plot is clever and entertaining, and we're getting to know Regan, Carter and the rest of the Flying Squad, but more than anything else this is just bloody good writing.

This episode is basically ten dimensional chess between three parties. Bishop (Alfred Marks is a splendid presence) is a criminal  mastermind on the run to France, and there's a rivalry between Regan and one Superintendent Pringle (a perfectly cast Peter Jeffrey) on how to deal with him, and how. It's fun to see how things play out, with Regan ultimately outsmaring both his adversaries.

Yet it's more than that. It's dialogue that is witty but also very real. People talk at cross purposes, there's wordplay, there's perfectly played cynicism. These characters feel real, despite us not knowing them much, purely because of the deftness of the words and the performances. Little things, like the unfriendliness of the local constabularty or the dark hints of domestic abuse at the end.

Yes, this is certainly the quintessential showabout maverick '70s cops who cut corners to get results. But damn, it's clever.

The Pit (1962)

 "Morte!"

This is a fascinating litle curiosity, a short, thirty minute film made for the British Film Institute as an artistic experiment, one which leads me to wonder whether much else like this may exist from the period. It is, of course, an adamptation of Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. And, while short, it is perhaps the finest I've seen. Roger Corman this is not.

Aside from the wonderfully darker ending, this is actually a pretty faithful adaptation of the short story. The film abounds with disturbing sounds and screams, but dialogue is almost non-existent. Monochrome, textured, the extraordinary setting shot with great atmosphere from such brilliant angles, with wonderful use of light... we really feel the prisoner's terror, as every night he sleeps in his cell to await to further fear and peril, knowing that, ultimately, he's just being cruelly toyed with. Ultimately, he is doomed. Brian Peck conveys his understated sheer terror to perfection.

The visuals are superb, the inquisitors utterly, existentially terrifying, and those horrible bells are still tolling in my mind. Short this may be, but it's well worth a look. this is the perfect encapsulation of why short films need to exist. Who has time for too much plot when you can have sheer, atmospheric terror?

Schalken the Painter (1979 TV Film)

 "The darkness is unsafe..."

This is an intrertestying little curiosity, a one-off Christmas ghost story broadcast on the BBC in late December 1979, on the surface feeling very much like the many M.R. James ghost story adaptations that were made at the same time. But, in reality, this is very different.

It's a ghost story, yes, this time from a short story by Sheridan Le Fau, and a rather chilling and atmospheric on, with a deathly, ghostly suitor that a man give his ward's hand in marriager to him in what we would, today, call a forced marriage... and there are terrifying hints that this many may be something undead or unholy, and that the poor girl is perhaps damned forever because "She is your property. She will become mine...".

The main character, Gottfried Schalken, is a very real, albeit relatively minor, Dutch painter from the late 17th century, and the period is shown perfectly in terms of cinematograpjhy, texture and direction. The actors are shot superbly,in an age where blocking was still a thing.

And yet, it's more than that. The slow, langorous pace, unthinkable nowadays, is essential to the creation of atmosphere. And the useof light echoes Schalken's paintings themselves, everything liyt by candlelight, strangely loveless, with something perhaps lurking in the darkness...

This is quite a wonderful little gem

Better Call Saul: Winner

 "I mean, four or six nipples. That's interesting..."

This is, of course, a truly astonishing finale, based around two shocking moments. The long pre-titles gives us some very bad karaoke and a flashback reminding us of the dynamic between Jimmy and Chuck, with Jimmy, even back then, as shallow and self-centred as ever. But then we get to the two contrasting narratives that define this finale.

Werner is going to die. We know this from the start. He's been too indiscreet, and attracted the attention of Lalo. The final scene between him and Mike is as inevitable as it is harrowing. The scene is utterly masterful, with Werner slowly realising wjhat has to happen, and accepting his fate with calm resignation. Yet the shot itself is not the worst part. It's that Werner, sothat his wife may live, has to phone her one last time and break her heart.

Throughout it all, we see Mike's pragmatic efficiency. He lies well, yes, but not like Jimmy- for him it's a job. And he has his ethics. He goes as far as he can in trying to persuade Gus to show mercy... but Gus's face is chilling. Giancarlo Espososito is a true master of facial acting.

And then we have Jimmy's hearing to be readmitted as a lawyer, an operation planned with the same military precision as the hunt for Werner. Jimmy's cynicism is a sight to behold. Visiting his own brother's grave only to be seen, performing as the good and dutiful man. His performance, in the end, is extraordinary... but it is just that: a performance. There are, perhaps, signs at the very end that Kim may be beginning to understand what Jimmy really is.

And the final lines, that Jimmy is not going to be practising under his on name and "Good, man"... oh my.

And yet... none of this is the most revealing thing about Jimmy.It's how strongly he identifies with a former shoplifter who is fated never to be accepted because of one mistake in her youth, how much he projects himself on to her, his own demons, how his rant supposedly in support of her is... not a good thing. Even in empathy, Jimmy is a selfish monster, one of the most fascinating characters of all television drama.

Doctor Who: The Devil's Chord

 "I thought that was non-diegetic".

The above quote says it all, and the song at the end even more so: this episode has a delightful relationship with the fourth wall. Some will hate this. Personally I love it.This episode is wonderful, witty, crammed with ideas, far more than a mere "celebrity historical" about the Beatles would have been.

The pre-titles is wonderful, establishing the Maestro as a terrible, Godlike figure who emerges out of piano lids and seems beyong the laws of reality. This is a nicely written scene, establishing the awful alternate history that we see.And the Devil's Chord... ah, Black Sabbath.

Ruby is excited to see the Beatles recording Please Please Me in her first tripminto human history... and it's hugely amusing, as well as cleverly avoiding copyright issues, to see the Beatles performing songs that are... rubbish. As has been all music since 1925, causing all sorts of consequences, hence Khruschev threatening Finland, which didn't happen in our timeline. A world without music, the highest art form, inevitably ends in the coldness of nuclear winter.

One may quibble over the mechanics of alternate history. If all good music ended in 1925, that creates many ripples. 1962 is decades later. The world should, perhaps, be different. The Beatles may never have met, or theor parents never met, meaning they would not be born. But... let us not quibble, for alternate histories traditionally fail to consider such things, and the scene where Ruby sees a devastated London in 2023, redolent of Pyramids of Mars, is chillingly effective.

But there's also time to reflect on the fact that the Doctor, in an earlier incarnation, is also here. We get a mention of Susan, the Doctor's grandaugher, to Ruby's amazement... and, heartbreakingly, we learn that she may have died in the "genocide". This is how to use continuity: this is a powerful character moment, not a random bit of fanwank.

And new mythology is being created. Maestro is the Toymaker's child and, like their father, one of the "Pantheon", a series of capricious beings, reminding me of the old Indo-European gods of Olympus or Asgard. I suspect more is to be revealed, but there is an "Oldest One" present at Ruby's birth, and "The One Who Waits" is coming. This, I suspect, is a season arc.

Overall, this episode is a joy. Playful, creative, respectful of the programme's past while looking ahead to its future. And that future appears to be in safe hands.

Doctor Who: Space Babies

 "Is vthat, like, a matter transporter, like in Star Trek?"

Here we are, at last, at the start of a proper full run of episodes with RTD at the helm and Ncuti Gatwa's new Doctor. So we begin, with the iconography of the new era in the shape of the Whoniverse logo and a nice little reprise for the new viewers.

This shows just how bloody good RTD is at the nuts and bolts of storytelling. After all, this is Ruby's introduction to the TARDIS and what it does, so why not use this as a pretext for a bit of exposition for viewers jumping on right here? So we get a nice, concise little precis of the premise of the show, but framed in a fascinating way: the Doctor, like Ruby, is a foundling, adopted by "posh people" on a fancy planet that is now gone because of "a genocide"- surely not an accidental choice of words to be spoken by an actor of Rwandan birth. There are non-diegetic hostorical echoes here.

The Timeless Child stuff is reframed here. It's not presented as a puzzle, but as part of the Doctor's background andhis depth of a character: he's alone, yet free, far more than just a Time Lord, and Gatwa plays the depth of the character superbly. I love the way he does comedy, too. Only RTD can give us a hugely expensive scene with CGI dinosaurs (thanks for the budget, Disney) just to make a fourth wall-brreaking little joke about the butterfly effect, but both actors play it superbly. And the joke is a statement of intent: that isn't how time travel works in Doctor Who. 

So we reach the main story, with space babies, a nanny, capitalism causing child abandonment and, er, a literal bogeyman. There's lots of nice, subtle political commentary here, not least with the fact that refugees can claim asylum, but only if they can find a legal route in, which they can't, because none has been providefd, Catch-22 by design. Quite. Small boats, anyone?

It's a delightfully weird, awfull clever story and, although RTD was criticised of old for his plots not quite working, this is like clockwork. The chemistry between the Doctor and Ruby is joyous. There are echoes of the Ninth Doctor and Rose, of coiurse. Instead of farting bins we get a snot monster and a space station which is lierally powered to move across space by baby poo. And the Doctor rejigs Ruby's phone to call her mum... and says "Tell your mum not to slap me".

This is all just there as a jumping on point, to introduce the show to new viewers, which it does superbly. But there's a deep orphan vibe here. The Doctor, Ruby and the space babies are all orphans. This is certainly pointiong somewhere... aspecially as the Doctor warns Ruby that they can't visit the time of her birt and do a Back to the Future, Part II, lest they cause a paradox.

In short, quite wonderful. I expected no less.

Total Recall (1990)

 "Hey, I've got five kids to feed!"

Yes, I know. I'm exactly the age and demographic to have seen this film close to when it came out, but have somehow contrived not to have seen it until I'm tantalisingly close to forty-seven years old. Well, I've seen it now. And, well, it's fascinating.

I mean, obvioudsly, it's an Arnie film and does all the Arnie stuff, but it's also fascinatingly conceptual hard science fiction, based on a story by Philip K. Dick. Admittedly, the only novel of Dick's that I've actually read is The Man in the High Castle, but I've seen enough film adaptations to recognise his signature themes of memory, identity and reality in play here- and the film is conceptually fascinating.False memories of great experiences being marketed to the public; false memories of an eight year marriage; the sheer bloody cldeverness of the plot when revealed at the end; a sex worker with three breasts; the question of, if you have amnesia, would you lose your new identity if you had your old memories back?

Arnie is gloriously Arnie, Sharon Stone has a nicely subtle little role, and you can always rely on good old Ronny Cox to play a damn good baddy at this time. And the effects- not CGI but real effects- are a joy to behold. That thing with the eyes when people are exposed to the Martian surace, though... urgh.

The end may be a bit of a cop out- surely Quaid and Melina would have died long before Mars was fully terraformed by the alien magic button? And would the alien device really terraform the planet with the exact amount of oxygen needed by humans? But these things don't stop Total Recall from being an absolute joy.

Echo: Taloa

 "I suspect you've come to kill me. Again."

For the most part, Maya is likeable, despite how brurally direct she can be at times. She cares, and she tries tyo fdo the right thing. But... pouring good wine away? Outrageous.

This is a rather gripping episode the finest yet, a tale of three tense conversations. The first, between Maya and the Kingpin, is the best: Vincent D'Onofrio, as ever, is simply extraordinary The two of them debate, often bitterly, but Fisk has no ill will for his surrogate daughter and insists he still loves her in spite ogf the minor incident surrounding a certain eye. Indeed, he has a proposition. Joi  him, and they can rule the galaxy as father and daughter. Or words to that effect.

Yet the calm confrontatiin between Maya and Chula is gripping too. Yes, their meeting has blatantly been delayed for plot reasons as they mutually realise they've been having the same visions of their ancestors. But, truth to tell, Chula really was neglectful because she couldn't bear to look upon the grandaughter who reminded her of her dead child.

So then we have the final confrontation between Maya and Kingpin, wherre Kingpin pours out his own abusive past... and Maya can't bring herself to kill him. He thinks he's persuaded her but, in an extraordinary piece of acting, he erupts in rage when he hears she's not going to join him. He's a dangerous, volatile man. But he really does love her...

Good, suble, character stuff.

Peeping Tom (1960)

 "Whenever I photograph, I always lose..."

, a

This film, by Powell not Pressburger, was apparently considered so shocking back in 1960 that Michael Powell's reputation never really recovered, but in more recent decades it's been recognised as a superbly conceived and shot examination of the psyche of a murderous voyeur... and that it certainly is.

The direction is utterly superb from the start, full of tension and playfully, visually, using the concepts of cameras and points of view. I can think of no film for which the phrase "male gaze" is more apt. All the murders of the women are superb pieces of drama.

Yet the characterisation and performances are also on point. Karlheinz Bohn, despite his accent often slipping (he was German), is very good as Mark, our creepy protagonist. Yet Maxine Audley is also superb as Mrs Stephens, blind, depressed, self-medicating on whisky, who ironically almost sees through Mark. Yet the character of Mark is well-observed. We see just enough of the childhood abuse he endured, and some to understand this twisted and damaged individual.

This is also a film unusually filled with granular detail of everyday life in the UK in 1960, a fascinating little time capsule in that sense. Most of all, though, it's a real triumph both visually and conceptually.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

 "You will see me one more time, if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad..."

This is, of course, an interesting film to watch while I'm one season in to Twin Peaks. The directorial style, obviously, is very much going for the same thing, and I don't just mean that it's directed by David Lynch; the colurs, the lighting, it's all going for a riff on small town homeliness, but with something not quite right. This is very much a film about Los Angeles, of course, but this is perhaps appropriate as for much of the film we see the city through the wondering eyes of Betty from small town Ontario, who initially can't stop smiling.

The film constantly exists on the edge of realism. For most of its length there's a mystery plot that makes sense if you squint a bit, only for realism to break down at the end of the film as paradoxes abound. Artistically, it's quite wonderful, perhaps about what Hollywood ultimately does to people's dreams. They arrive hoping to make it... but the city is chaos, and nothing makes sense. The film looks like a dream, but perhaps the prospect of making it in Hollywood is no less so.

People don't quite behave realistically. It's 2001, but mobile phones don't exist; the film is and isn't quite set in the present. There are dreams, states of waking... it's very Lynch.

Regardless of meaning, though, the film is a joy to watch, with fascinatingly weird set pieces and visuals which, again, skirt the edges of realism. Is it my favourite David Lynch film that I've seen? Hard to say. But it's certainly an extraordinary piece of art.

Passport to Pimlico (1949)

 "Blimey! I'm a foreigner!"

It's ridiculous that I hadn't seen this iconic Ealing comedy until last night but, well, now I have. And it's brilliant, obviously. But it wasn't quite what I expected. And I'm not just talking about the scene with a pig in a parachute..

This is very visibly and very deliberately set in a post-war London of rationing and bomb sites. An unexploded bomb looms large. There are constant references to the privations the characters all went through a few years earlier. In the late 1940s, this is what it means to be British... and yet, the characters are all fun, quick-witted, likeable and enjoying life regardless. This is not the privately educated England of the stiff upper lip, but the real England of beer and belly laughs.

...Until it isn't. The central conceit is that, suddenly, this little street on Pimlicois in fact, legally, a random surviving remnant of the Duchy of Burgundy, with a descendant of Charles the Bold as its sovereign. The film plays, for laughs of course, all the difficulties ofva community finding itself as a microstate, with no pre-existing law, government, police, armed forces or foreign relations. Indeed, the film gets surprisingly abstract and philosophical as it humorously examines the very concept of nationhood. It's a nice touch that the microstate enjoys a massive heatwave while it's Burgundyy but, as soon as it's British again, the heavens open...

The cast is superb. Stanley Holloway is perfect, a strikingly young Charles Hawtrey has a memorable role, but for me it's Margaret Rutherford's eccentric professor who stealds the show. This is a fine little comedy but also quietly intelligent in its themes, and a fascinating little time capsule.

The Sweeney: Jackpot

"There's got to be a perfectly logical explanation for all this..."

Another excellent episode to follow-up the pilot, perhaps no surprise as it's scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin. Realistic characters, naturalistic dialogue- a very hard thing to do- naturalistic action and naturalistic, shaky camerawork, surely an even harder thing to do with the size of TV cameras in 1974.

The plot- a bag with £35,000 goes missing after some villains are apprehended after a robbery, and it's suspected that Regan or one of his men may have nicked it- is conceptually simple. But the resolution is quite clever, and the conceit works quite well in drawing out the characters and relationships between Regan's men. I wonder if we'll get a proper ensemble feel, looking ahead. And the main villin, a man universally despised and looking at a fourteen year stretch, looks a truly tragic figure by the end. That's good writing.

Again one has to raise an eyebrow at the casual attitude to warrants and waiting for the suspect's solicitor before interviewing him.. but this is the Dark Ages, before 1984. Waterman is superb, and so is Thaw... and that's his natural Mancunian accent, isn't it?

I'm already enjoying this a lot. It's much more serious than it's popular reputation so far. Let's see if this continues.

Echo: Tuklo

 "If the offer still stands... I'm helping you."

This is the best episode so far. Of course, it centres on Maya, Bonnie and their Uncle Henry being kidnapped and waiting for the Kingpin's goons to arrive, including a rather awesome big set piece to Rob Zombie's "Dragula".

But, of course, the episode was about more than that.

Bonnie's Choctaw ancestry continues to be important, and not just in the decoration of the new artificial leg for her made by Skully. Delightfully, we have a pre-titles sequence set in the Old West in the style of an old silent film, complete with intertitles, about another kick-as female ancestor whose skill Maya seems to have... somehow inherited? The character from the comics is well after my time; perhaps this is her thing.

But, even more, it's really about character. Henry, despite his annoyance at what Maya has brought to him, choosing to side with her regardless. Bonnie meeting Maya, in awkward circumstances, and her bitterness about Maya not getting in touch just once. That Skully urges both Maya and Chula to reconnect. That last bit of misdirection at the end, where we think Maya is going to see Chula.. and she sees someone else entirely.

I still don't quite know where this is going, but there's a nice unity of styler, motifs and tropes. This is very good.