Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)

"Curiouser and curiouser..."

Alice in Wonderland was a very Tim Burton film, and Tim Burton is a director with a very distinctive individual style. It's extremely odd, then, that this sequel should have gone ahead without being directed by him. It seems somewhat humiliating to ask a director (James Bobin is best known for the recent Muppets films) to adopt the style of someone else. The result is perfectly diverting but not entirely successful.

Like its predecessor, this film is entirely original, with only nods to the source material in scenes involving chessboards, Humpty Dumpty and the love me while essentially telling a tale about Alice travelling back in time to save the Mad shatter, who's feeling a bit down. It's a visually arresting film, as you'd expect, but it tends to drag somewhat. Johnny Depp's relative lack of screen time doesn't help, and nor does it help that in those scenes where he does appear the plot doesn't really allow him to be entertaining. Still, Mia Wasikowska is again superb as a splendidly feminist Alice, and the moral of the film is that women can indeed be sea captains, patriarchy be damned.

Highlights are Sacha Baron Cohen as Father Time, a rare example of his playing a character not created by himself, and Andrew Scott as a sinister Victorian doctor obsessed with locking women away because of "female hysteria", reminding us of the dark realities of the time. But best of all is Helena Bonham Carter as the gloriously mad Red Queen. Her eventual reconciliation with the White Queen may be absurd and corny, but it's supposed to be.

This film is uneven, mildly disappointing and nowhere as good as its predecessor. But in spite of this it remains a glorious visual spectacle with a splendid cast and is worth watching in spite of it all.

Sherlock: The Lying Detective

"I'm the widow of a drug dealer, I own property in central London, and for the last bloody time, John, I'm not your housekeeper!"

The character of Culverton Smith is, at one level, the embodiment of an idea explicitly referred to in the script: what if all the serial killers we know about- mentally subnormal, odd and marginalised- are just those who get caught? What if, every so often, there is a rich and powerful serial killer who simply kills with impunity? There's a blatant subtext here: Smith stands for Jimmy Savile, and that obviously informs Toby Jones' (excellent) performance; he even has his "own" hospital. There's a reason why Sherlock Holmes declares Culverton Smith to be the very worst and most despicable adversary he's ever met.

This is a plot by Steven Moffat which is surprisingly straightforward and relatively free of his usual narrative tricks, although the camerawork remains as clever as is usual for Sherlock. It isn't really a whodunit, either; like Columbo, the tension lies in whether or not Sherlock can prove the guilt of the obvious killer.

No; the narrative tricks lie elsewhere, in the interplay between Sherlock and John, and in their interactions and slow reconciliation. And yes, Sherlock is almost... nice, at times here. He certainly reacts sensitively, for him, when John confesses that he is not the man Mary thought he was, and had been flirting by text with another woman. It is here, with the character stuff, where we see the more traditional Sherlock narrative cleverness. And it's good telly. And yet- it's about time we had a proper, clever whodunit, don't you think?

Nice cliffhanger, though,,with Sherlock's sister, whom I assume to be a baddie...

Sherlock: The Six Thatchers

"Don't you dare! You made a vow!"

Oh my. Well, spoilers abound, obviously. You have been warned.

The episode starts out so light-heartedly. There's a nifty cover-up for Sherlock so he can not go to prison, and he's all happy and stimulated in the knowledge that Moriarty is back. Sherlock even seems to be channelling Matt Smith's Doctor for much of the first part of the episode ("Are those ginger nuts?"), and there's much fun to be had throughout. Hence the shock at the end. But let's look st the whole episode as Mark Gatiss has utterly outdone himself with a superb bit of telly.

It's fun seeing Holmes rush through a fun series of cases in what has become typical Sherlock style, with John's blog superimposed on screen, all the wit and fun of the birth of little Rosalind and the addition of a baby to the dynamic, and especially the way that John and Lestrade manage to bond by taking the piss out of Sherlock. And then, almost in the background, we're introduced to the busts of the Evil One that give us our modern version of The Six Napoleons. At first this isn't foregrounded but, after a bit of fun with Toby the uncooperative bloodhound (never work with children or animals) we discover that there are six of them, made in Tblisi. And I for one knew, having read the short story, that the significance was likely to be the contents of one of the statues. But that isn't the twist; the twist is that this isn't to do with Moriarty at all, or the magnificent red herring that is the Black Pearl of the Borgias. It's about Mary's past.

We get a flashback to an embassy hostage rescue gone wrong, with one of the four agents being Mary and another being our antagonist whose name, we learn, is Ajay. And Ajay seems to think that Mary is a traitor and wants her dead. That's awkward. Yet Mary denies this to Sherlock and, after a fun few scenes in which she tries to leave for exotic shores to sort it out herself, she ends up explaining herself both to Sherlock and an understandably peeved John. Poor Ajay ends up dead but it seems that Mary is not the "Englishwoman" who betrayed them all. So who was it?

What is awful, and will of course become even more awful, is that John has been exchanging sexy texts with another woman, and it's even left ambiguous whether he's had an affair. All this while Mary thinks he's perfect. So the final scene arrives and the baddie turns out to be Vivian Norbert, the secretary- and we have, obligingly, been provided with a few clues to that effect. The crime is solved, the case is over- but Sherlock can't resist gloating over his adversary and, horribly, Mary ends up taking a bullet for him, and John's whole world with it. And the guilt must make it even worse.

So we end up with John cutting Sherlock out of his life utterly even as Mary implores Sherlock from beyond the grave to "save John Watson". The gloom is leavened only by a neat little reference to The Yellow Face and Mycroft making a call to "Sherrinford"....

That was good. Sherlock is back.

Sherlock: His Last Vow

"I'm a doctor. I know how to sprain people."

After two episodes which play with structure we get something resembling a more traditional plot, although it is not so much a whodunit as a question of precisely how Sherlock will bring down the nefarious Charles Augustus Magnusssen. There's a big twist, certainly, in the revelation that Magnussen's "documents" are stored only in his head, but the structure of this episode is less traditional than it appears.

The unusually prominent political subtext is something new, too. Magnussen is a fairly transparent analogue for Rupert Murdoch, of whom I, as a Guardian reader who has been following the whole phone hacking saga since long before it was fashionable to do so, am most certainly not a fan. I find the description of red top tabloids' activities as blackmail quite apt. It's also nice to see Sherlock shooting the bounder at the end. As he says, "The personal freedom of anyone you've ever met is a fantasy."

But none of this is really the point: this episode is about Mary, whom Magnussen is blackmailing on account of her apparently quite bloodstained past, and the strain which this revelation places on her relationship with John. John's fury, their awkward estrangement over Christmas, and their deeply moving reconciliation are all beautifully written and acted. As per the original Charles Augustus Milverton, however, Sherlock gives not a jot about why she is being blackmailed.

Lars Mikkelsen is splendidly slimy as Magnussen, with a clear undercurrent of sexual molestation in his treatment of both Lady Smallwood and John. But it is, as ever, the small character beats that make this episode shine, from Molly slapping Sherlock for lapsing back into his Class A habit to every scene between John and Mary. Sherlock's explanation to John that he has pretended to be in love with Janine, even to the point of engagement, just to get at her boss, reminds us what a sociopath he is, but it's nice to see she gets her revenge by selling kiss-and-tell stories to the tabloids, which ties in nicely with the episode's themes.

The scenes inside Sherlock's head, after Mary shoots him, are an act of directorial genius, the highlight being Moriarty in his padded shell, doubling as a nice bit of foreshadowing. Appropriately, it is one Louis Moffat who plays the young Sherlock.

Obviously, the highlight of the whole episode is Sherlock and Mycroft being caught smoking by their mother, especially in the light of Magnussen's description of Mycroft as the most powerful man in the country. But the climactic scene highlights the parallels between Sherlock and Magnussen: both are sociopaths, both have "mind palaces", but the parallels end there. 

It looks as though Magnussen has won, but Sherlock manages to cut the Gordian Knot by killing him. It looks as though he faces exile and certain death for this murder, but then we get our cliffhanger: Moriarty is back...

Black Mirror: The National Anthem

“The online hive mind did the maths.”

If you expected to see the next Buffy review, don’t worry; the blog is otherwise going to be entirely Buffy (plus a movie most Saturdays) at least until I get to the end of Season Three. After that I might switch to a short, one-off series (probably Edge of Darkness, but we’ll see. It might be Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set- any preferences?) before I start to alternate episodes of Buffy and Angel. After that, I’ll probably do something similar after each 44-episode block. Otherwise, though, the only other stuff I’ll be reviewing is current television. And that pretty much only means Dark Mirror, Sherlock, and Doctor Who. Otherwise it’s Buffyverse all the way!

Anyway… I’ve really been looking forward to this. It’s by Charlie Brooker, for one thing, and the man can (almost!) do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. But the concept seems brilliant; a modern take on The Twilight Zone, with three independent teleplays extrapolating various ultra-modern technologies (Twitter, reality TV, Sky Plus) and extrapolating in a vaguely sci-fi way. Plus, knowing the writers involves, I suspect there’s going to be the exact sort of darkly humorous tone that I like so much.

This episode begins with a ringing mobile phone in the marital bed of prime minister Michael Callow (Roy Kinnear). This is appropriate, as it more or less foreshadows the theme of modern technology, its intrusiveness, and the way it speeds things up to a pace which makes rational thought impossible. I notice the last thing we hear, in the final scene before the flash forward at the end, is also a ringing mobile phone, but the circumstances are horribly distance. It’s a nice touch to bookend things with this motif.

We have the highest of high concept, er, concepts: a terrorist has kidnapped a popular princess, and is going to kill her unless the prime minister has sex with a pig, on live TV, that very afternoon. Eurgh. This is strangely appropriate from a former writer from Oink, a comic I remember well from my childhood. But, obviously, this is really about the media, the twenty-four hour news cycle, the tyranny of mass opinion, and the impossibility of hiding things in our post-superinjunction age. No sooner does the PM see the video than he’s told it’s up on YouTube, and trending on Twitter. D Notices mean nothing in this context, and the British rolling news channels can’t keep quiet if CNN and Al Jazeera are not. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

There are some delicious moments of very Charlie Brooker cynicism- the Queen’s attitude; the tweets in general; the journalist getting information by shooting footage of herself naked, and then literally getting shot; and of course the attitude of the public once the severed finger from the princess is apparently received. If there’s one consistent theme in Brooker’s work then it’s a healthy disdain for the mob. Ironically, the PM doesn’t even know of the attempt to fake the… footage in question. But it’s still him who has to face the consequences.

From this point onward we know that the clock is ticking and there’s no escape. Deliciously, it’s the opinion polling that seals the PM’s fate, as well as the clear implication that neither he nor his family would be safe from the mob. From hereon in there are many, many shots of the PM all alone. And that’s what he is, despite the audience of 1.3 billion and the empty streets- Brooker has no doubt that empty is what they would be. We don’t get to see the act itself, mercifully, but the PM’s suffering is very clear. He’s left pounding away for nearly an hour.

The twist, of course, is that it’s all a twisted joke; the ultimate artistic installation from a former winner of the Turner Prize. One year later it’s all back to normal, except that the PM is now dead to his wife, whose final call he couldn’t bring himself to take.

Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars

“Don’t drink the water. Don’t touch it. Not one drop.”

I’ve written three pages of notes for this one, possibly a new record, and trust me, I’m well concise. This review could be a bit long.

Doctor Who certainly looks great, these days. The CGI is simply incredible; this is the Martian surface at its most iconic. And the first few minutes set up the “base under siege” scenario with superbly economical handling of the exposition. We’re introduced to the whole crew, all of whom have the required degree of depth for their respective life expectancies, and there’s a comedy robot to lighten the tone. Best of all, the excitement starts quickly enough for us to avoid any of that tiresomeness that often ensues when people become suspicious of the Doctor.

It’s an interesting future, too, a reality sketched out by the odd line here and there. It’s 2059, and after forty years of environmental struggle, humanity is finally stepping towards the stars with its first colony on another world. I love the fact it’s called Bowie Base One. It’s a multinational group, too- there’s a large bunch of flags on the wall of the control room. Base under siege, multinational crew… it’s just like the late ‘60s all over again. Oh, and there’s the “Branson Inheritance”.

We have Lindsay Duncan as the tough but principled Adelaide Brooke, who understandably dominates given her role in the story. The other characters are there for background and flavour, really, but it’s impressive that you can’t tell which ones are going to be the redshirts.

The threat besieging this particular base, a kind of sentient water, isn’t as scary for me as many have said it is. That doesn’t matter, though; the possessed people still look amazing and the sense of threat is very real. For me the effect was more that of a disaster movie than a horror movie, but that’s no bad thing. The threat is effective, that’s what matters. I love the scene where we slowly see and hear the change in Maggie from over the shoulder of the oblivious Yuri. And there are some very human tragedies, particularly Steffi’s tearful final moments watching footage of her daughter to Roman, who spends most of the episode as an annoying young smarty-pants, courageously accepting that the one drop that fell on his face means he must stay and die.

It’s nice that the Ice Warriors get a nod, too. And that 42nd century spacesuit has probably finally featured enough to become part of the Tenth Doctor’s iconography.

But all that is the surface. More than any episode we’ve seen before, this story drills deep into the core themes of the programme, and does this brilliantly. The concept of changing history has been around since the early Hartnells, and has come to the fore again in recent years with the added concept of “fixed points in time”. The Doctor mentions The Fires of Pompeii to Adelaide, of course, and the echoes of this story are loud indeed. But I’m reminded equally of The Aztecs. It’s a benchmark, a line in the sand, which shows us how far the Doctor has come since those days. Because he is, of course, the last of the Time Lords.

Twice before the climax the Doctor has a chance to leave; two moments of temptation. He may only stay, once he finds out where and when he is, because he’s forced to remain, but he changes his mind about leaving, just as he warns Adelaide that anyone could be infected. And, of course, there’s the long, drawn out moment of temptation just before the climax.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This story is our first real example on screen of the much-mooted concept of an “historical” set in our future. To the Doctor, this “history” is every bit as immutable as the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day or the destruction of Pompeii. But, at this point, with no other Time Lords to set the boundaries and no companion to stop him, will he act in the way he advised Barbara to act, long ago at the beginning of the Marathon? The whole story pivots on the Doctor’s decision and what it means for his character.

The character of Adelaide is important here; as someone the Doctor respects, she’s made privy to the Doctor’s deliberations. As an historical figure, she was even spared by a Dalek fifty years earlier, implicitly because of the weight of her historical importance. It is because of her sacrifice that her granddaughter is set to become the first human to reach Proxima Centauri by faster-than-light travel. And she’s shown, and portrayed, as someone with gravitas, dignity, but also integrity and humanity. The Doctor trusts her enough to know that she will release him from the airlock even as he tells her the full, horrible truth. These are very deep dramatic themes.

We know what’s going to happen, and the thought is terrifying. He’s the only Time Lord left, with no peers to condemn him. He has no companion to temper his Time Lord arrogance with humanity. And he is alone, a Lonely God. He makes up his mind, and sets out to do all the things he implored Barbara not to do. Because he can. His self-imposed limits are gone, and he becomes dizzy with dangerous, tempting, corrupting power.

These scenes are brilliantly written; the Doctor is a subtly different character here. All of his usual mannerisms are present and correct, but he’s so arrogant and self-centred, even self-obsessed. Having not mentioned the hints of his future thus far this episode, now his” Three knocks is all you’re getting!” shows us the fear of death which perhaps underlies what he’s doing. Sounds like the denial phase to me. Worst of all is “It’s taken me all these years to realise the laws of time are mine. And they will obey me!” The echoes of the Master are deliberate, I’m sure. We see where this path must ultimately lead.

After a dramatic countdown the Doctor saves the day, and the survivors stand in shocked silence on a central London street. There’s an awkward mood. Adelaide, understanding what the Doctor has done, is appalled: “No one should have that much power!” Mia and Yuri are simply scared of this capricious, godlike figure, who cavorts with mortals for his sport. Worse of all is Adelaide’s realisation that he has no idea whether or not humanity’s future in the stars will now happen. The Doctor, in the knowledge that his song is ending, has become so fixated on saving lives which are a proxy for his own that he has lost sight of the things which he once found so important. And he’s oblivious of this, demanding why no one is thanking him. Only when we hear the shot from inside Adelaide’s home (a surprising moment for a family show, although the suicide isn’t too explicit) does he realise what has happened. He has indeed gone too far. And the vision of the Ood is not just a rebuke bit a reminder that he must finally accept that his song will end. He isn’t quite redeemed, though. He spends the last few moments clearly terrified of what awaits him. His sudden and symbolic pulling of the lever inside the TARDIS to escape the scene of his crime indicates that he is still afraid to face what is to come.

Sublime, perhaps the Boom Town of the specials (and I loved Boom Town, personally) in that this episode wraps up the deep, thematic stuff in preparation for the fireworks that are to come. 5/5.