Legends: This Is Liverpool

 "That's called importing drugs. It's sort of the opposite of what we do."

Things get even more dramatic and dangerous this week for our underpaid Customs officers working on a shoestring and risking our lives, showing the real costs. Yet we also see why they're doing it. A young Tommy, ironically the son of one of the kingpins himself, finds himself hooked on heroin through a perfectly ordinary and natural set of circumstances, and we slowly see his decline and death. it's harrowing, and it happens to the very father who... orchestrates the shocking ending.

Guy is getting deeper and deeper into his "legend"... and thereby connecting well with Don, who well knows the appeal and the costs. And he's under pressure to show what he can do by actually importing large quantities of heroin which, well, he can't do. But, in a delightful sequence, Don solves the problem in arranging a deliberately botched raid by armed police in Felixtowe. I also love the sequence in which he desperately gets some customs officers to back off. Steve Coogan absolutely steals every scene he's in.

Kate and Bailey also have some excitement, getting locked in while sneaking around but getting away with it through sheer desperate cleverness. But the moment of sheer drama is Shaun's cover being blown, and he and his family subsequently escaping a fiery death by the skin of their teeth. It's utterly gripping, and really sells the risks of undercover work... yet, earlier in the episode, Shaun confesses just how much he's loving it.

Still utterly gripping, even if much of the episode is necessarily setting things up. 

Legends: Could You Offer More?

 "Lunch money? What are you, twelve?"

1990. It was a very different time, the early years of rave culture, and Thatcher (just!) hanging on. But it was also a time of massively increasing availability of heroin. And so we have the hard-hitting opening, with two young people, from very different class backgrounds but both with their lives ahead of them, have those very lives snuffed out.

There is, of course, a lot of cynicism in how the government of the day reacted- Alex Jennings has an excellent cameo as rightly forgotten Home Secretary David Waddington driving home this very point. Thatcher, at a low ebb, needed a success. But there's no doubting the moral urgency of snuffing out the heroin trade.

The way this is to be done, however, is on a shoestring. Ordinary civil servants from Her Majesty's Customs and Excise are to go undercover, with only a little training, no extra resources and no extra pay... which is, wow. And so we have our triumvirate who have what it takes- Bailey the VAT man (yay, he says cryptically!); Kate the vice officer, and Guy from Customs- a real person who wrote the book on which all this is based. They are the only three who make it through the rigorous selection process, which is enormous fun to behold.

It's a joy, as ever, to experience the sheer charisma of Steve Coogan as Don Clarke, the world-weary yet wise man in charge, the person who anchors all this. And, soon, we see our brave trio into action, and very real danger.

This is going to be fun. Loving the character of Mylonas...

Doctor Who: Resolution

“I always think I’m rid of them. I never am.”

This episode was written by Chris Chibnall. It is genuinely superb. Those two sentences don’t feel right together but, incredibly, they belong together on this occasion. This is a brilliant piece of telly, with a genuinely superb dramatic scene between Ryan and his father, and the best use of the Daleks since, well, Dalek, using the threat posed by one Dalek to banish all memories of recent years to re-establish them as the ultimate baddie to be feared.

The set-up is superb; narration, a mediaeval fairytale backstory and a mythical tale of an ultimate monster split into thirds and buried in far-flung places. A pair of archaeologists established as real characters through good dialogue before one of them is put through the wringer. And yet the true brilliance is in the basic plot- a naked Dalek without its casing reassembled after twelve centuries and forced to manipulate humans slowly into building it a makeshift casing out of available materials like an episode of the A-Team. This is brilliant not only because it's a fresh and superb take on the Daleks but because we are establishing that not only is one Dalek an unimaginable threat but that it doesn't even need any weapons or equipment or anything other than, well, a bubbling lump of hate itself to come damn close to annexing this planet.

Even better, the reveal of the Dalek casing is quite rightly held back, and the Heath Robinson nature of this Dalek has us clamouring for us to see how they actually look in the Chibnall era. No doubt we have that to look forward to. Next bloody year.

If I may nerd out a little more, though, it's great to have the little fan nods ("I wish I could remember exactly how long a Rel is") and the firm statement that there is no Kate Stewart and no UNIT in the Chibnall era; the Doctor and her friends are on their own. UNIT has been mothballed, it seems, for pettifogging and deeply shortsighted financial reasons, as happens in politics all the time, and the UK has decided to leave an international organisation which is vital to its security and prosperity and bugger the frankly terrifying consequences. It's good that nothing analogous is happening in real life, right?

This is also a much better episode for the Doctor and her by now very well-knit crew; right from the tour of the universe's best CGI for New Year at the start they're a united and supportive bunch, although Yas yet again seems to get the least to do. It's a phenomenally strong Ryan episode, of course, introducing us to his dad Ryan after a lot of set-up over the last season. The result is an extraordinarily written scene in a cafe between father and son, and a masterfully written arc for Ryan, Aaron and Graham. I like the nuances of Aaron's character; far from being a cipher of a deadbeat dad he's a highly competent and able engineer, and while no excuses are made for his past behaviour he's shown as genuinely wishing to feel his way towards redemption. And Chibnall should be praised for resisting the easy cop-out ending of having Aaron sacrifice at the end; instead his near-death helps him with beginning to re-connect with his son.

Come to think of it, not a single named character dies- in a Dalek story.

I can't really fault this. I spent the whole of Season 37 waiting in vain for Chibnall to wow me, and at last he's done it. For the first time he's written a story for Doctor Who that is worthy of debate as to whether it deserves classic status. What took him so bloody long?