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.

Alien³ (1992)

“You’re gonna die too…”

Well, I suppose they can’t all be good. The first two films in this franchise are both superb, but this one… isn’t. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. For one thing, the other two films were both shot by A-list directors, but I’d never heard of David Fincher until I Googled him just now. I certainly should have done, I grant you, but he's no Ridley Scott or James Cameron.

Having said that, though, the film is serviceable. It isn’t awful. It’s just that it’s totally lacking in suspense and moments which make you jump, and has absolutely no sense of the unity of style and content which made the first two films so slickly gorgeous in their very different ways.

There isn’t the same sense of threat, either. After a film with hordes of the buggers we’re now back to just one Alien, which just doesn’t seem as nasty as the one in the first film. Without the constant emphasis on its toughness and its acid blood it’s suddenly a lot closer to being just another monster, albeit a rather cool looking one. And killing Newt and Hicks before the start of the film, while showing us how nasty the alien is, gives us a rather alienating sense of discontinuity. And why do we have to be told that it’s “Ellen” Ripley? First names have no place in this franchise! It might be nitpicky, but I don’t like the fact that Bishop is referred to as a “droid”, either.

It’s a bit jolting, and inconsistent with what’s gone before, that such a large proportion of the supporting cast should be British (complete with phrases like “rubbish tip” and even the pronunciation of “lieutenant”, which really surprised me!). It’s always a joy to see the great Brian Glover, possibly the world’s greatest Yorkshireman, but even Charles Dance can’t hide the fact that Clemens is such a deeply dull character who really drags the film down by taking up so much screen time. Even the revelation of his supposedly great secret is such a massive anti-climax that you’re quite relieved to see him being immediately impaled and killed by the alien.

Charles S. Dutton is magnificent, mind- such charisma. It’s just that he looks out-of-place among such a bunch of wide boys. And the whole concept- a bunch of scum-of-the-Earth criminals who have found fundamentalist religion- is a bit random, to say the least. Nothing much is done with this concept, so why have it at all?

Even the foreshadowing of Ripley’s death is not handled well. There’s a certain neatness in Bishop asking to be killed early on, just as Ripley will later, and the scene of the Alien next to Ripley is nicely iconic. But the inevitability of Ripley’s dying soon, one way or another, actually takes away tension rather than adding to it, and there’s precious little of it to start with.

Lack of tension aside, the general look of the film is certainly competent. But there’s no flair or sense of ownership of the film’s aesthetic. Everything just looks like generic, contemporary science fiction. The aesthetics of the first two films were so much more than that.

Just one Alien film to go, then. I hope it’s better than this one.

Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen

Part One

“I suddenly feel conspicuous.”

So, now we’re beginning a new 45 minute format, eh? It’ll never catch on. We’re also getting a new writer, apparently, in the shape of Paula Moore.

We begin with the new Doctor being very different from his predecessor- after procrastinating about it ever since Logopolis he’s finally getting around to repairing the Chameleon Circuit. Apparently he’s still a little unstable, which is worrying. This regeneration has been drawn out far too much.

Lytton’s back, still stuck on Earth, planning a heist alongside characters played by Brian Glover and an unmasked Terry Molloy. But mostly we’re just watching the Doctor and Peri hanging about in the TARDIS for ages before they land. They seem to bicker a lot, too. Still, they eventually land, in 76 Totter’s Lane. In spite of the Doctor’s claim that “This looks familiar”, it bears absolutely no relation to the junkyard seen in An Unearthly Child. It hasn’t got a roof for one thing. 

The Doctor and Peri are trying to trace a distress call from an alien being broadcast from Totter’s Lane in 1985, observed by those two policemen from Resurrection of the Daleks. Oh, and the TARDIS is changing it shape in scenes which I think we’re meant to find amusing. But it’s not just Totter’s Lane; this scene alone features a bewildering and self-indulgent excess of fanwank; not only does Peri recite the name of several past companions for no particular reason, but we’re told that the Terrible Zodin was “a woman of rare guile and devilish cunning.” And that’s only the beginning.

You can probably see already that I’m not hugely enamoured with this story, but I’ll defend it for one thing; for all the bickering between the Doctor and Peri it’s obvious that neither of them really means it and they actually come across as quite affectionate with each other, especially through body language. It helps that Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant have good chemistry.

A Cyberman shockingly appears in the sewers- and is immediately shot dead, oozing green, er, ooze. This is a highly appropriate intro for the Cybermen in a story which shows them to be disturbingly easy to kill. We discover that Lytton made contact with their ship behind the dark side of the moon- all very The Invasion. 

It’s nice that cybernisation gets a mention, but then the fanwank continues; the Cyber Controller and Telos are mentioned, and suddenly we switch to an escape attempt on the part of a couple of slaves on Telos- and to be fair the location is a fair match for the Telos we saw in Tomb of the Cybermen. Our two escapers, Stratton and Bates, are very hard-boiled style characters, almost to the point of being characters in a script by Eric Saward. But of course that cannot be, as this story was written by Paula Moore. Definitely.

The Doctor and Peri find Russell, and there follows an amusing scene in which the Doctor and Peri get the gun off him, and the Doctor seems to tell Peri to shoot him. Oddly enough, I don’t have a problem with this in spite of my increasing unease with the tone of the programme. The Doctor’s clearly bluffing and the thing’s carried off with charm and humour- it’s the absence of these things, after all, that have been my main concern with recent scripts.

Russell, it seems, is an undercover copper, and so he joins the Doctor and Peri in venturing into the sewers.

Meanwhile, on Telos, Stratton and Bates seem to be killing Cybermen with the greatest of ease whenever they stop bickering for long enough to do so, while the Cyber Controller directs things. For some reason the rather rotund Michael Kilgariff has been pointlessly recast in the role, in spite of the fact that both here and in Tomb his entire body in covered, and in the earlier story he didn’t even provide the voice. The result of this is, of course, that a certain softly pronounced “c” in the line “It is a fact, Controller” becomes a moment of comedy gold.

The Doctor kills a Cyberman with a sonic lance (guns and the Doctor again!), unfortunately attracting their attention. As the Doctor and Peri return to the TARDIS, accompanied by Russell, who shows the customary lack of surprise at its dimensions for this era, they are attacked by Cybermen…

Part Two

“I can understand why they call them tombs.”

The Doctor queries the Cyber Controller’s survival and is told that he was “merely destroyed.” Er, yes. This begins a running theme of this episode; ridiculous plot points and fanwank references revealed to us by dull and often long-winded exposition. We get detailed references to The Tenth Planet and Tomb early in the episode which must have been utterly alienating to the casual viewer.

The Doctor, Peri and Lytton are stranded and, separately, all make contact with the planet’s indigenous Cryons, played by the likes of Sarah Green, Faith Brown and Esther Freud, all unrecognisable. The Cryons actually look great and, with their groovy hand movements, dignity and wit, are the best thing about this story.

It seems that Lytton was in fact working for the Cryons all along, which of course means he is an entirely a good guy and the fact that hitherto he’s behaved like a total arse in no way diminishes his unambiguously heroic status.

Anyway, the Cybermen want to prevent Mondas from being destroyed, so they’ve travelled back in time to 1985 so that they can use Halley’s Comet to destroy Earth, thereby saving Mondas. This is utter fanwank; the series is now becoming sufficiently self-referential that it’s eating its own tail. What on earth would the casual viewer have made of this?

Still, at least it fundamentally makes sense. Aside, that is, from a couple of tiny little flaws, such as the reason for Mondas’s arrival back in 1986 was that they needed Earth for its energy, and the question of whether the Cybermens’ survival is really served by changing history for the benefit of a completely different bunch of Cybermen and wiping out centuries of their own history.

There’s a nice scene where the Doctor wonders why the Time Lords haven’t sent an agent to help after he warned them earlier, only to realise that he is the Time Lord agent. Sadly, this is soon followed by a discussion of why the Cryons are helping him. As even the script points out, they stand to benefit from the Cybermen changing history as their planet would never have been invaded. The explanation that “The Cryons have accepted their fate” doesn’t really cut it. As for all that frozen explodey stuff that’s being kept in the cell- aaargh!

Things get even worse. I don’t mind violence as long as it’s not done in the service of an overly grim tone, but the scene where Lytton’s hands are crushed is utterly repellent. How was that allowed to get through? Also poor is the Doctor’s statement that the Cybermen “have only one weakness- they respond to the distress of their own kind”. I think, given the number of Cybermen we see being killed in this story, that his mathematical prowess may have deteriorated somewhat since Castrovalva.

More bad stuff rounds out the story; Bates, Stratton and Griffin almost reach the Cybermen’s control centre only to be killed at the last moment- very cynical. The TARDIS is suddenly stuck as a police box again with no explanation whatsoever. And the scene with Lytton begging the Doctor to kill him is just wrong.

Terrible, just terrible. The plot makes no sense, it’s unremittingly grim, the tone is all wrong and it’s all substandard fanwank anyway. 1/5. The nicest thing I can find to say about it is that at least it’s better than Underworld.