The Sandman: Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope

 "Writers are liars."

I'm again following far too many series because pesky present day telly insists on throwing up The Rings of Power, Inside Man and (coming soon to this blog) Andor. Fortunately this is a season finale, so I now have only Hawkeye, Breaking Bad and films to balance with all those. Anyway...

This is a beautiful coda to what is hopefully not the only series of Sandman. Here we have two achingly beautiful, profoundly meaningful fairytales that are so very, well... Gaimanesque.

As one who has been the property of many feline owners over the years, I was both amused by and admiring of Dream of a Thousand Cats, a cartoon with many famous voices. It transcends its superficial resemblance to Animal Farm (the Prophet is stroikingly similar to Old Major) to reach annundeniable truth. Cats, much as we adore them, have utterly enslaved us, and would certainly kill and eat them if they could... well, except Ashi, and Badger, and Loki, and Gizmo. I'm their daddy, so I'm safe. Right?

So it indisputably true that a reality shift occurred not all that long ago, and before then we were much smaller than them, and hunted by them. This is undoubtedly true,

Calliope is much darker, using myth to explore male abuse and exploitation of women, and the ensuing hypocrisy. In this case Richard is stealing the ideas of Calliope, a woman, and taking credit... not exactly unptrecedented. Arthur Darvill is superb as a dark protagonist straight out of an updated version of Hammer House of Horror, while Derek Jacobi is exquisite as an elderly writer who owes all his success to the fact that he kidnapped a Muse, Calliope, while on holiday in Greece, the Muse who inspired Homer.

Richard finally gets his just comeuppance at the hands of Morpheus, whose tender relationship with Calliope- despite their past bad blood centred on theor son Orpheus(!) is deeply touching.

This is just a profoundly beautiful bit of telly.

Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks

"You're going to fire me at the planet? That's the plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it?"

"To be fair, that is slightly your MO…"

"Don't be fair to the the Daleks when they're firing me at a planet!"

Oooh boy. That Steven Moffat is a very clever and naughty man, casting Jenna-Louise Coleman in this, as a character who can't possibly be a companion because she's not from contemporary Earth and, oh yes, she's actually a Dalek. And yet her last word is "Remember". What's going on? How can I possibly wait to find out? Grr. Typical Moffat to smuggle this into precisely the episode no one would expect it. We've come to expect misdirection from Moffat, but this time he's outsmarted us all.

Oswin (a boy's name, surely????) is the emotional heart of this episode. (Actually, this episode rather appropriately has two emotional hearts, the other being Amy and Rory, but we'll come to that.) We spend the whole episode seeing how cool, nice, quirky, pretty and downright amazing she is, only to find out that her life is an elaborate fantasy (an old Moffat trope; I remember Silence in the Library…) and she's been turned into a Dalek. And then, of course, she sacrifices herself to save the Doctor and his friends, proving that she's human after all.

It's unique seeing the Doctor's relationship with Amy and Rory these days. He travels alone these days but, as Steven Moffat has often said in interviews, it's not as though they'll never see the Doctor again, and the stories as transmitted are those particular moments where they do- implying, of course, loads of untransmitted adventures for the Doctor. He could age years between episodes. And so we have a paradox: we only see the Doctor from the Ponds' point of view, but we also see the Ponds from the Doctor's point of view. Years have passed since we last saw them. Amy is a successful model. And, upsettingly, they're divorced. And, of course, Amy explicitly insists that this is the sort of problem that the Doctor can fix. And yet, annoyingly and wonderfully, he can. (It seems the split up was about children- I predict that the episodes to come might see the patter of tiny Ponds…?)

Misdirection aside, of course, there was genuinely stuff here to please those of us who like a bit of fanwank. We had some real Sixties Daleks, one courtesy of RTD, and crowd-pleasing mentions of "Spiridon, Kembel, Aridius, Vulcan, Exxilon". But there was cool new stuff- the epic CGI awesomeness that was the Parliament of Daleks, the Dalekised humans (foreshadowing!) and the Dalek zombies. Especially the Dalek zombies.

The conclusion of the episode, though, courtesy of Oswin's cleverness, has the Daleks forgetting the Doctor, continuing the recent theme whereby traces of the Doctor's existence are currently erased. This is definitely leaving somewhere. Just like the end of The Wedding of River Song, we end with a constantly repeated "Doctor Who?"