Good Omens: I Know Where I'm Going

 "So Elspeth here has all the opportunities because she's so poor."

"That's lunacy."

"No, that's ineffable."

The above quote says it all. Like last week's "minisode" (I've finally worked out what's going on with those: they're the historical flashbacks inserted into the episodes), Aziraphale learns a damn good lesson on moral ambiguity, and on the fact that seeing morality s something literally dictated from on high may not be the best idea. Here, he learns that lesson in 1820s Edinbugh, complete with bodysnatchers, laudanum, David Tennant getting to use his real accent and the anachronistic use of "Flower of Scotland".

It must be sais, fun though the episode is. Yes, Muriel's attempts and pretending to be a human police officer are hilartious, but the effect of her being there is to prevent the Maggie/Nina romance plot from having to move forward too quickly so other stuff can happen. Aziraphale discovers a few clues in Edinburgh, but it isn't much.

Whatever has been going on with Gabriel gets curiouser and curiouser, though. Plus Shax, and Beelxebub, have worked out where Gabriel is, and this means war. Still, fun though this episode genuinely is, with another sparkling script, I'll be glad if some more actual stuff can happen next time.

Good Omens: The Very Last Day of the Rest of Their Lives

“Just imagine how awful it might have been if we'd been at all competent."

It's the end, then. oh, I'm aware of what's been said in the media; Gaiman hasn't ruled out a second season, and he and Terry Pratchett even had at least some discussion way back when about a novel. But really; there are obviously no particular plans to continue and it all seems pretty much well-wrapped up to me.

It's a splendid finale, too. Oh, I realise it ends about halfway through with Newt breaking all the world's military computers with his superhuman klutziness while Adam firmly insists that a CGI Benedict Cumberbatch is not his father, in a bizarre reversal of The Empire Strikes Back, and we proceed to spend the rest of the episode in an indulgent celebration of Crowley and Aziraphale's six thousand year friendship. And why the bloody hell not? It's all highly entertaining, and the swap between the two of them to survive their respective punishments is, er, devilishly clever. Never mind that Mrs Llamastrangler guessed what they'd done, or that they're lucky that their respective punishments were indeed holy water and hellfire respectively. I'm far too entertained by this to be churlish about plot holes.

Even better, we get Agnes' new prophecies, and shipping of Sergeant Shadwell with Madame Tracey, as soon as he's checked she has an acceptable number of nipples. But best of all are our two friends, those magnificent actors Messrs Sheen and Tennant, and a superb adaptation of a splendid novel after three bloody decades. Wonderful.

Good Omens: The Doomsday Option

"Your car is on fire!"

Mrs Llamastrangler and I are somewhat distressed that there’s only one episode left to go, and a second series is unlikely given the sad, untimely death of the wonderful Sir Terry Pratchett. This is, if anything, the least good episode so far, much of which can be put down to its being Part Five. It’s still bloody brilliant.

We begin with Crowley at the bookshop, distressed that someone has apparently killed the man he now calls “my best friend” (although I love how Aziraphale, now partly played by Miranda Richardson whole role is suddenly no longer a bit part, has such a very English reaction to realising this), spends the whole episode in a state of furious, heroic, utterly David Tennant determination such that it’s tempting to call Crowley the central heroic protagonist of the entire series- I mean, he gets through the impassable hellfire that is the M25 in a burning car to get to Tadfield, where the delightfully British reaction of the local man whom he stops for directions and is too polite to point out that his car is on fire is one of the funniest scenes so far.

Interestingly, there’s far less piss-taking of the American military in the US airbase than there is in the novel, but everyone is gravitating towards there- the Four Horsemen, Anathema and the now-deflowered Newt, and of course Adam- who, having not been properly raised as an Antichrist, is sounding a little more sane. But there’s still time to mention Crowley’s intense dislike of the 14th century, something I was beginning to expect would remain only in the novel. And there is, of course, the ultimate nuclear cliffhanger...

It’s an energetic, fast-paced, apocalyptic penultimate episode. I suspect the finale will be anything but.

Good Omens: Saturday Morning Funtime

“Did you count their nipples?”

Adam, very much a Boy's Own Antichrist, is starting to affect reality in visually expressive ways which are a good opportunity for actor cameos but, of course, being exposed to New Age Twaddle can have a highly deleterious effect on any child, Beast or not. We meet a new Horseman of the upcoming Apocalypse- Pollution, Pestilence being a bit too old-fashioned these days. Apocalypse, though not quite now, is clearly quite soon.

I like the bit with Death following soon after although it's unfortunate that, unlike in the book, we don't really get the Terry Pratchett version. But then the Pratchett version can only really exist effectively in print. Far more televisual is all the palaver at Megiddo, but things are now too far advanced for either Crowley or Aziraphale to be able to square things with their respective Head Offices; both are rumbled. This episode mostly concerns their trying to deal with this fact, in Crowley's case a highly entertaining series of attempts to escape from everything. Hastur being trapped on a cassette tape is genius; Neil Gaiman was quite right to take this wholesale from the novel, our modern digital world be damned.

The bits with Newt and Anathema meeting being blown about and shagging, all as foretold by Agnes Nutter, is fun, as is any scene containing Shadwell. Derek Jacobi is nice in his little cameo as Metatron, a Kabbalistic figure who I just had to look up. And yes, that's quite the cliffhanger. More please.

Good Omens: Hard Times

"I didn't really fall. I just, you know, sauntered vaguely downwards..."

A surprising start, this time, as an extraordinarily long pre-credit sequence charts the history of what both Aziraphale and Crowley would no doubt refuse to call a friendship, and has a lot of fun along the way. So Crowley raises an eyebrow at God's genocidal plans as Noah builds his Ark, and it's in fifth century Britain that both of them realise they've been cancelling each other out with their various schemes so they may as well achieve the same thing by doing precisely sod all. It's all a rather funny addition and ends with a highly entertaining Second World War scene containing 66.67%  of the League of Gentlemen, which can never be a bad thing. and the other 33.33% is William Bloody Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, in the present day, the plot doesn't really advance much, but it fails to do so most entertainingly. We, and Adam, learn that Anathema is a new age type. Shadwell hasn't got much of an imagination. Crowley and Aziraphale are a superb double act, and both Sheen and Tennant are amazing. There's a new horseman- Famine.

It's all very silly in a very Douglas Adams kind of way. And there are few more pleasurable ways to spend fifty minutes.

Sherlock: The Abominable Bride

"I fear she has branched into literary criticism by means of satire. It is a distressing trend in the modern landlady."

Well, wasn't that superlatively brilliant? Oh, the present day scenes were a little pointless in terms of content (I hate Sherlock's "mind palace", too) but I suppose they had to be there to justify this episode happening. Everything else was awesome.

There's a lot here for fans of Conan Doyle's original stories by delightfully mashing A Study in Scarlet with A Study in Pink, introducing us to Sherlock with Victorian trappings. It's a real treat; all of the characters as portrayed by the actors we know work just as well in a Victorian setting, as well they should, and we have lots of fun with all of them, including Mrs Hudson. Even Mycroft (Mark Gatiss in a fat suit) and Molly Hooper (er, in a moustache, but nicely illustrating the episode's themes) make appearances.

The central image is delightfully grotesque, too- a gun totin' and bloodied bride, reminding me of the character from Kill Bill. So too is the use of Watson's stories for the Strand magazine, and the suggestion that there's a distinction between the "real" Holmes and the one who appears in the stories.

It's well directed, as everything by Douglas Mackinnon invariably is, with plenty of Sherlock's trademark visual storytelling tricks, a magnificent escape from dull realism as well as being extraordinarily clever.

There are plenty of nods to the canon, from the acknowledgement that The Blue Carbuncle is a bit pants to the five orange pips (and the use of Klan like hoods at the end ties into this, if I may spoil a century old short story). The ghostly figure haunting Sir Eustace through the mist even calls to mind The Hound of the Baskervilles. Most intriguing is the mention of Itene Adler, and the hint that the "real" Holmes has a more complicated reason for lack of interest in women than the canon version. And then there's the cocaine. And Reichenbach. Yes, even Moriarty works in this context.

The big reveal- that behind all this are a protocol-female just secret society out to get votes for women and punish abusive men- is both wonderful and a satisfying payoff to the wry commentary on gender politics as seen throughout the episode.

And then it's the present day. And Moriarty's back. Not that he isn't dead or anything, but he's back anyway. And we probably have years until the next episode...

Doctor Who: The Husbands of River Song

"What's that? Are you... thinking? Stop it. You're a man. It looks weird."

The Moff ended the series just gone by subverting the Big Epic Season Finale through rejecting all of the epicness in favour of a more human, character-based episode. Here he uses the Christmas episode to give us a perfect little character piece, albeit with plenty of entertainment along the way. This is almost certainly the swansong for River Song, and an extremely fitting one, and rumour has it that it was almost- but not quite- the Moff's last script for the series. Long may he reign, say I.

The plot is a glorious Christmas caper, but we shall say little about it other than to note the nice little nods to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and The Brain of Morbius. There are some splendid comedy turns from Matt Lucas and (in a part that must have been enormous fun to play) Greg Davies. Oh, and I love the way the Doctor defeats Hydroflax's body by using the fact that the stock market is so utterly incomprehensible. But the episode is essentially both a screwball comedy and entirely about the relationship between River and the Doctor. So let's proceed to talk about nothing else, shall we?

The main conceit, of course, is that River spends the whole episode failing, rather amusingly, to notice that the man she's with is the Doctor. In a lesser script this could have made the character look stupid, but not here; it's nicely counterbalanced by River being portrayed as cool and resourceful. Indeed, the Doctor/companion relationship is essentially reversed to the point where River holds the Doctor's hand and runs and, in the episode's funniest scene, the Doctor pretends to be amazed that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, seizing the chance to do it "properly". Both Kingston and Capaldi are superlative, and so is their chemistry together; the two of them on screen together work wonderfully well as a believable couple. Capaldi's ongoing moments of annoyance at River's other "husbands" are a joy, as is River's casual comment that she's always "borrowing" the TARDIS without the Doctor ever noticing.

And yet.. River is sad. Her diary is running out of pages, and the man who gave it to her would have known how many pages she needed. Silence in the Library beckons, especially as the Doctor here gives her the sonic screwdriver that she uses in that story. A nice touch, although the sonic trowel is cool and perfect for an archaeologist, as my fellow Time Team fans would know.

The scene where the penny finally drops for River ("Hello, sweetie"- more role reversal between them) is wonderful, as is her passionate speech about the Doctor; she loves him with all her heart, but you don't expect a phenomenon as big as the Doctor to love you back as a mere mortal would. And she's fine with that.

Their last ever date before River's death (I love the revelation that River's last night will last 24 years!) is wonderfully written with dialogue that sings like the towers, which are themselves a metaphor for the awesome monolith that is the Doctor. It's the perfect ending to what may well be the finest ever Christmas episode.

But how long will we have to wait for more Doctor Who?

Doctor Who: Flatline

"Could you not just let me enjoy the moment of not knowing something? I mean it happens so rarely."

Hmm. This episode wasn't bad. It was really quite good, in fact. So please don't take this the wrong way, but... wasn't there a touch of Fear Her about this? The setting, the two dimensional baddie, the fact that its a season cheapie- there are s lot of similarities. Still, Fear Her was cack, and this was bog standard. 

Yes, the conceit is great: two dimensional baddies. And it's fun to see the TARDIS shrunk, and all the cool things they do with it. More fundamentally it's good to see things being done with its dimensions for the first time since, really, Planet of Giants. 

Still, I like Rigsy, and I like the fact that we're rooting for the kid on community service and left in no doubt that his supervisor, definitely the UKIP voting type, is an arse. 

The character star stuff is good, too; Clara hasn't told Danny that she's still travelling with the Doctor! And, with the Doctor stuck in the shrunken TARDIS, she gets to spend an episode being the Doctor, and doing it well. More interestingly, as explicitly acknowledged in the dialogue, she gets to see things from his point of view, an interesting counterpoint to their big row in Kill the Moon.

Still, not an awful lot to say about this one. It was quite good, but you can tell the crew are thinking about the big stuff at the end of the season. What's this about Missy "choosing" Clara...?

Doctor Who: Listen

"Fear doesn't have to make you cruel or cowardly..."

Nice little tribute to Terrance Dicks there.

Hmm. Bit of a curate's egg, this. There are some clever character moments and nice twists, as one would expect from Moffat, and some brilliant use of structure. The artistry of the writing is really something to admire. And yet...

It wasn't scary. We were promised a scary episode, but what we got was a well-worn and old Moffat meme; the things in the corner of your eye. And,  after working with the Weeping Angels and the Silence, it falls flat here. We've seen all this before. Ultimately the episode's central trick fails. And all of the positive comments that follow should be taken in that light. Listen just doesn't work.

Still, there is a lot of great character and arc stuff here. Clara and Danny are clearly meant for each other- we even meet their descendant- and the interesting parallel between these two Coal Hill schoolteachers and their predecessors from that early evening in the Autumn of 1963 is deliberately foregrounded by their bonding over Courtney, a puzzling pupil in the tradition of one Susan Foreman. Perhaps the irascible first Doctor of every regeneration cycle needs a couple of Coal Hill teachers to humanise him. The old ones are the best. And don't think I didn't notice the line "Fear makes companions of all of us." It's a cleverly done parallel.

Moffat, he of Coupling fame, is of course brilliant at the relationship comedy stuff, and the scenes between Clara and Danny (Samuel Anderson has great comic timing) absolutely sparkle. But the elephant in the room is again Danny's military background, something traditionally set against the Doctor's supposedly strict no-guns approach (although he seems to have had no problems shooting Ogrons in Day of the Daleks and Frontier in Space) and presumably a reason for the Doctor disapprove of Clara's new boyfriend when the time comes.

Except... this episode deconstructs all that. The parallels between Danny and the Doctor are clear enough anyway, but the final scenes really hammer it home; the little boy sleeping in a barn outside the children's home, alone, is not Danny but the Doctor, and the presence under his bed is only Clara, once again inserting herself into his timeline. 

The Doctor, it seems, wanted to be a soldier before joining the Academy, and many years later he would return to that same barn, wearing John Hurt's face, to make that fateful decision during the Time War...

As an episode in itself, this fails. As a piece in a wider arc, it's brilliant. I can't wait to see where this is all going; the arc and character stuff seems to be nuanced, well-constructed and confident in a way we haven't quite seen before under Moffat, fantastic though his era has been thus far; I suspect that, this time, deadline pressures have been absent. This season is on course to be bloody good. It can absorb a failed experiment like this episode.

Doctor Who: Cold War

“I’m always serious… with days off.”

Mark Gatiss. I’ve reviewed a fair number of his scripts by now, but I’ve never really expressed a direct opinion of his work. That changes now. After all, everybody else seems to have an opinion. This is mine.

The opening scene is a nice microcosm of what I’m going to talk about: the contrast between nostalgia and innovation. It’s essentially a tribute to the opening titles to The Ice Warriors as broadcast back in 1967, but complete with modern camera movements and “non-diegetic” text, to use a big word what I learned from Graham Kibble-white in the latest DWM, which is something we’ve seen a lot in recent Doctor Who. Here we have a contrast between pastiche, a nostalgic reverence to the past, and the sort of metatextual playing with narrative structures, the sort of thing we associate with Steven Moffat. Gatiss is not like this. He’s a highly competent writer, but he prefers to work with an established style and structure, honouring the past without adding to it. It’s a more limited approach than Moffat’s, but one that can work in the right context. He’s very good at ghost stories for example.

This story is a direct pastiche of the “base under siege” stories of Patrick Troughton’s second season. A submarine is the perfect setting for this sort of thing. Even little details like the Doctor’s decision not to use his psychic paper and the suspicious first officer are little nods to this. In many ways this works, and gives us quite a good episode. And yet, as many have pointed out amongst my Facebook friends, the forty-five minute format makes this feel rushed. Ironically, however, as my girlfriend also pointed out, the need for suspense causes things to drag somewhat. Even a nice little touch, such as the Ultravox loving professor, doesn’t prevent the story from dragging.

The Doctor is as brilliantly portrayed as ever by the mercurial and superlative Matt Smith, but we have little further with which to judge Clara. She’s shown to be feisty and brave, but otherwise could just be any generic companion. Still, this is only her third episode as a companion, and perhaps an episode such as this, based largely on suspense, was never going to be characterisation heavy.

Where this episode succeeds massively is in its depiction of the Ice Warriors, an old monster who, to be brutally honest, I always thought were fairly rubbish. But this Ice Warrior, supposedly a legendary figure, is much chunkier, scarier and, well, cooler. Little scraps of dialogue hint at a cultural hinterland, while the honourable values of the Ice Warrior are shown in a way that doesn’t just make it look like a Klingon. The 80’s setting is also pleasingly evoked, given the shortness of the episode, with a nice use of 1983 as a setting, the year the world nearly ended.

Best of all, though, we get to see a naked Ice Warrior, and what it looks like under the shell. Its face, dragon-like, was a punch the air moment. Gatiss is a rather more limited writer than the likes of Moffat, but a script like this, nostalgic and working within a defined structure, plays to his strengths. Usually, I find his best scripts are his ghost stories. This one isn’t far behind. It isn’t brilliant, but it’s very solid.

Doctor Who: The Power of Three

"There are soldiers all over the house. And I'm in my pants."

It's close. Very close. This is the penultimate outing for the Ponds, an episode which takes the time to fully examine both characters, and how the Doctor has affected their lives, until they leave the show next week. I have no idea what's going to happen, being joyfully unspoiled, but I couldn't help but notice the ominous hints: the Doctor admits to Brian that some of his companions have dies, and it's eventually Brian who changes the Ponds' minds and gets them to choose travelling over real life, adding, ominously "Just bring them back safe." Oh dear. That lovely night-time conversation between the Doctor and Amy gives off similar ominous vibes. They're doomed, right?

We get a proper examination of their dual lives, pulling at the Ponds in two directions. That, rather than the gimmickry of the plot, is what the episode is about. The central device, of a very slow invasion, is hardly original, and nor is the concept of loads of mysterious McGuffins suddenly appearing, but then it isn't supposed to be. Indeed, the script even goes so far as to point this out, as Brian rattles off a list of all the usual tropes. It doesn't matter. Let the plot just go ahead and be Quatermass- this is about the Ponds. Although, admittedly, the tension-filled moment where the Doctor opens the box, only to find nothing, is rather too obviously straight out of Kinda. And it's a bloody huge coincidence that, of only seven wormholes on the whole planet, one of them should just so happen to be in the hospital where Rory works.

It's nice to see UNIT, too, of course, and it's especially nice that they've been reformed to be much cuddlier, losing the Orwellian overtones of recent years and becoming infused with scientific values of which the Doctor approves. Kate Stewart, Head of Scientific Research, is a great character, very Doctorish, and making her the Brig's daughter is not only good shorthand but also a sign that we, the viewers, are allowed to be invested in her as a character. She'll probably be back; they cast a Redgrave, after all. Also, the Tower of London being their not-very-secret base is well cool.

It's a good Doctor episode, too. Matt Smith gets, and delivers, such magnificent speeches, and the sequence of him doing household chores (and keepy-uppy) is fab. I'm also enjoying these fun little mini-adventures, this time involving Zygons, Henry VIII, and God knows what else.

The villains are a bit blah, very casually sketched, although admitted the Doctor gets a great speech out of the situation. And the Doctor saves the day with little more than the most casual application of handwavium. But that's sort of appropriate. It's not really about the plot.

I'm nervous about next week. Very nervous…