Dark Season: Episodes 5 and 6

Episode Five

"A ventilation shaft. Marvellous. I’m a cliche.”

The middle episode, and we discover that Pendragon is digging not for Celtic archaeology but for an old MOD building beneath the school, and the Behemoth is an AI war machine that she once created. In spite of her cod-mysticism she’s actually a scientist, but so mad and melodramatic that only Jacqueline Pearce could possibly have played her: a genius scientist sacked for being a Nazi and prone to lots and lots of speechifying.

Elsewhere, Miss Maitland fails as an English teacher as she “corrects” Reet’s grammar to end a sentence with “and I”, failing to understand the difference between the nominative and the accusative.  Don’t you just hate that? But at least she begins to overcome her scepticism and get stuck in. Thomas, in spite of some more terrible acting from Ben Chandler, has some amusing scenes with Pendragon as it turns out his Aryan looks come mostly from hair dye.

It’s a rather cool ending as the Behemoth awakes and it’s revealed that the “chosen one” is in fact needed to sit in the chair and be subsumed into the machine- a sacrifice which now suddenly falls to a bizarrely ecstatic Pendragon. This is brilliantly mad chikdren’s telly.

Oh, look. There’s Mr Eldritch.


Episode Six

“There will be now new age. Only a dark age.”

A rather excellent finale as Marcie exploits the differences between the Nazis and the chaos-loving Eldritch, Lawful Evil vs Chaotic Evil. There’s a debate between Marcie and Eldritch to persuade the fully sentient Behemoth, and arguably a debate about whether it’s Miss Maitland with her bulldozer or Marcie with her words who saves the day.

All this stuff about the end of a century being an important time (it’s only 1991, kids) feels quaint from the vantage point of today, but it works. And Grant Parsons’ Eldritch is a splendidly melodramatic villain. And best of all is the scene where the increasingly cool Miss Maitland gives the Nazis a right good bollocking.

It’s a nice upbeat ending, Marcie is blatantly the Doctor as always, and this is a brilliant bit of telly. But I suppose it had to end; there are only so many sci-fi thrrats that could threaten a school. But that young RTD, the Why Don’t You bloke who wrote this- he’s going places, I tell you.

Dark Season: Episodes 3 and 4

Episode Three

"If I was here to give answers, I'd open an answer shop!"

A satisfying conclusion to the first three part story here, with a nice little twist as it’s revealed by the old man that “Professor Becjinski is my wife!” using Mr Eldritch’s casually misogynistic assumption that the man must be the professor as a trick. Of course, this means that Marcie and her mates don’t actually save the day, but it’s a nice way to end. I also like the way Mr Becjinsky tries to persuade Dr Osley to turn on Eldritch, giving Osley his big speech about the world deserving what it’s going to get.

Also interesting is Eldritch’s motive; although he intends to ensure all computers are networked and under his control, he doesn’t want control; no, he wants to create chaos.

Marcie gets some heroic stuff to do, and there’s a countdown (why do baddies never just press a button that does things instantly?). And, of course, Eldritch vanishes. It’s a big, satisfying ending, although Marcie, Reet and Thomas are perhaps a little sidelined. In fact, things would have pretty much unfolded much the same without them.


Episode Four

“Liberty Hall!”

Don’t imagine I didn’t spit the blatant reference to The Three Doctors up there. Anyway, Marcie, Reet and Thomas are back, with hesitant help from Miss Maitland, as Jacqueline Pearce turns up and steals every scene she’s in with aplomb. She was a force of nature and she will be missed.

Miss Pendragon is an eccentric baddie with a mysterious agenda and, quite rightly, the manners of Servalan, who is conducting a sham archaeological dig in a quest to find the “Behemoth” of Celtic legend. As Thomas notes, her commitment to diversity is less than ideal as all of her underlines have a suspiciously Aryan look. Indeed, she seems to have hired the handsome but dim Luke just to stand around being Aryan and unblemished, and suddenly abandons him when he gets slightly hurt. Nazi much?

Marnie spends the episode being splendidly moody mixed with bursts of Doctorish activity. We’ve established the format in the first three parter; now we can just get on with the adventure, and it appears the Behemoth may now be emerging...

Dark Season: Episodes One and Two

Episode One

“Normal is for the comatose!”

If you think Jodie Whittaker is the first female Doctor Who then you are quite, quite wrong. Let’s look at the evidence: RTD writes; 25 minute episodes; Marcie acts and speaks exactly like the Doctor; the directorial style and incidental music is exactly like Cartmel-era Who which is, after all, only a couple of years ago. The baddie even begins by saying “Nothing in the world can stop me now!”. I rest my case.

This is, in fact, a brilliant bit of telly that only the very 1991 fashions can’t spoil. The script is superb; Victoria Lambert is superb, Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor as a thirteen year old girl. The paddle is a bit of genius. It’s genuinely bizarre that she doesn’t seem to have acted in anything else. Then there’s a young Kate Wibslet (the less said about Ben Chandler the better) and such British telly stalwarts as Brigit Forsyth and the great Cyril Shaps.

Like Cartmel era Doctor Who, the programme hides its lack of budget with lots of mood, atmosphere, and having this and intrigue be a substitute for expensive spectacle, and does it well. It’s also full of strong characters, an intriguing mystery, and an intriguing men-in-black villain in the splendid Mr Eldritch. But the clothes, oh, the clothes...



Episode Two

“If I can teach you two anything it’s this; shut up and do as I say. Out!”

The plot thickens and so does the characterisation; I love Marcie’s fun little relationship with the exasperated and harassed Miss Maitland, and how only she realises that anything weird happened. We also begin to see how the Professor is at the heart of all this, leading to a splendid cliffhanger. And, this being the early ‘90s, we have the obligatory cyberspace bit, with even a kind of proto-internet. In 1991.

It’s weird to think I was about the same age as the kids in this at the time, but in some ways it doesn’t feel so very long ago. It’s intetesting to be reminded of a time where not all schools gave lip service to any of this silly uniform nonsense, for example, whatever the resulting fashion disasters. Thing is, though, what does Mr Eldritch want? So far he just walks around looking cool while talking like a super villain in a vague sort of way, more of a trope than a character as such. Not that I have any problem with this.

Steve Jobs (2015)

"I play the orchestra."

Five years after Aaron Sorkin scripted a biopic of Mark Zuckerberg he does the same for the late Steve Jobs, another scion of the Silicon Valley aristocracy, this time helmed by Danny Boyle, whose London Olympics opening ceremony has certainly not harmed his career. The result is gripping, full of quick-fire dialogue (that'll be Sorkin, then) and plenty of zingers and little nostalgic touches. Throughout it all is a portrait of a confident- nay, arrogant, bordering on unlikeable visionary who, while not an engineer or a programmer, is the conductor who cannot play an instrument but plays the orchestra superbly.

The film is structured around the preparation to three distinct big speeches in 1984, 1988 and 1988, all big product launches. It's a brave yet ultimately successful way of limiting the palette in order to produce a cohesive narrative. Michael Fassbender is spellbinding and the excellent Kate Winslet is barely recognisable; a leading Hollywood actress actually playing a role that isn't sexualised.

The emotional centre of the film is Jobs' relationship with his daughter Lisa, starting with his denial of paternity but ending with his actually delaying his speech- a big thing- for her sake. We also see his abrasive relationship with his underlings, but he inspires loyalty in spite of everything. In the end, his vision triumphs, although it's interesting that the film ends in 1997, before Jobs' biggest wave of successes.

I like the nod to the fact that you can't get inside any Apple device without special tools, the grainy picture, the nod to the iPad's origins in Jobs noticing the clinginess of Lisa's Walkman, but at its heart this is a masterful character study. It is an artfully constructed and fascinating little film.

Titanic (1997)

"I intend to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star."

This is, well, the biggest, most epic film I've yet blogged. It's long, expensive and big in every sense of the world. Is it any good? Well, yes. It has deep flaws in its pacing but it is a technical triumph of cinema, and the interminable first half eventually gives way to a second half (in real time from the moment the iceberg is hit until the final sinking in a significant chunk of the film that does not feel to long) which can stand among the finest disaster movies ever made.

That first half, though... yes, it looks amazing in its recreation of Belle Époque opulence, but it is bloated and unwieldy. Yes, the modern day sequences are nice and, yes, Gloria Stuart is a legend of cinema, but given the sheer amount of footage these sequences are disposable. And the long setting up of the relationship between Rose and Jack takes up a normal length film by itself- and, if that were the whole film, this would be fine.

Yes, it's nice to see the the amusing Hollywood romantic comedy trope whereby a woman starts out by being intensely annoyed by the man she will ultimately fall in love with. Yes, Rose and Jack are star cross'd lovers, divided by the gulf of social class. Yes, it's funny to see Cal's unthinking snobbery ("That's amazing. You could almost pass for a gentleman."). But the effect of all this is somewhat undermined for the audience by the fact that the characters are all on the Titanic and, bloodthirsty as we are, we're all impatiently waiting for that iceberg.

And the constant use of that bloody Celine Dion tune doesn't improve matters either.

There are some nice touches; we get to see such Titanic perennials as the unsinkable Molly Brown and J. Bruce Ismay. The Captain is played by Bernard "Yosser Hughes" Hill. There's a very nice sweeping camera movement from the Bridge to the hot, stifling environment with the machinery below. The class gulf between first and third class, and between old money and new, is made very clear. Jack seems to be a fan of Picasso's Cubist period. Rose gets naked and there ensues what can only be described as a sketching montage.

It's still a relief, though, when we're saved by the iceberg. It's an instant change of tone, and urgency; levels of panic will slowly rise and rise throughout the second half of the film. Jack finds himself handcuffed to a pillar as the ship starts sinking, and this leads to a magnificent sequence whereby Rose rescues him; this is truly superb, perhaps the highlight of the film.

Order soon collapses into chaos, with the brave, the selfish, the rich and the lucky finding themselves on lifeboats more often than not. The film becomes more and more gripping as desperation takes hold, with scene after scene providing top entertainment. Perhaps my favourites are the band- truly noble- the Captain going down with his ship and the gentlemen in first class who remain behind to die "But we would like a brandy."

The final moments of the ship are superb,  and we get to see the tragic deaths of people bobbing in the water while people watch in lifeboats which are nowhere near full, and (spoiler alert!) Jack's death is such a powerful moment. 

Titanic is a mixed bag of a movie: overlong, and a mix of bad melodrama and great disaster movie. But the latter, and it's awesome technical accomplishments which won it all those Oscars, makes it a film that has to be seen.

Finding Neverland (2004)

“But I’m not Peter Pan. He is.”

There are two types of films starring Johnny Depp: those which are directed by Tim Burton, and those which aren’t, and on average the former category is better. This is definitely an exception, and shows once again that Depp’s acting range is phenomenal. He’s not just a pretty face, but possibly the most talented leading man in Hollywood today. It’s either him or Robert Downey Jr.

Depp plays the childlike yet wise J.M. Barrie, true eccentric and creator of Peter Pan, with a Scottish accent that sounds flawless to this Sassenach; he has a real talent for accents. He isn’t obvious casting, but makes the role his own with his trademark attention to external mannerisms. There’s also a superb performance from Kate Winslet, and a puzzlingly small one from Dustin Hoffman.

The film chronicles the innocent relationship between Barrie and widowed single mother Sylvia Davies, and the increasingly close relationship between “Uncle Jim” and her four children. His relationship with both mother and children is entirely innocent, but a brief scene with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at a cricket match makes it clear that suspicions were held even in 1903, decades before Jimmy Savile was born. It’s unfortunate, these days, that the main character is an Uncle Jim.

The children are the inspiration for the play Peter Pan, but the film gradually darkens with the realisation that Sylvia is not well, and the children are fated to be orphaned yet again. The most interesting of the children to the theme of the film is Peter, a boy who rejects imagination and storytelling, finding it hard to disentangle them from the lies he has always been told about the seriousness of both his parents’ illnesses. It is fitting that, of all the children, he seems to be the closest to “Uncle Jim”.

The climax of the film is deeply moving. Ok, if you must, I’ll admit that I cried, dammit, in the most manly way possible. Still, at least my girlfriend didn’t point and laugh. Much.