Firefly: Shindig

“You think you’re better than other people.”

“Just the ones I’m better than.”

Our first episode written by Jane Espenson begins in a way that’s already starting to become familiar; a moving camera shows Mal and co in a dimly lit bar which is offset by some bright colours, and it all very quickly kicks off. Is this going to become a Firefly trope? Still, we get a bit more backstory as it’s established that a slave trade exists in this society. Naturally, Mal has no compunction about robbing such people…

The gang are making a lot of enemies on Persephone, and could really do with leaving. Their next destination (whose name I didn’t catch) seems a much classier place, superficially at least. Inara arranges to meet a regular client, a posh bloke called Atherton Wing, while Kaylee gets all excited about a posh frock that she sees in a window. There’s more than a bit of Eliza Doolittle about Kaylee- she’s a bit common, yes, but so are many of us, and she’s a lot lovelier than a lot of her “betters”. Mal’s nasty comments here don’t go down well at all.

Time for some plot, then. Badger is back, and wants Mal to work as his agent in doing a bit of smuggling for another posh bloke called Warwick Harrow. Nathan Fillion is great here, as is Mark Sheppard. Of course, now that we’ve met the deeply sinister Niska, Badger is suddenly a lot less scary and has become more of a fun character.

All this means finding Harrow at some posh do. That means Mal needs a lady to go with him, and Kaylee gets to wear her posh frock after all. And, who’d have thunk it, it’s the same party as Inara and her post client. I don’t like this Atherton much; he wants Inara to be his “personal companion” and she’s mulling it over. This feels uncomfortably close to The Crimson Petal and the White, which I read quite recently, and makes me like this rather arrogant Atherton fellow even less.

I love the cut straight from Jayne’s “So, we gonna play cards or screw around?” to a rather lovely scene of Zoe and Wash being all post-coital!

It’s not nice to see Kaylee being bullied by a load of posh girls (who, it’s implied, own slaves), but she’s soon rescued by a nice man who can’t stand “useless people”. Yay! Soon she’s in her element, talking machinery with a bunch of friendly men. It’s an interesting example of set and costume design, this ball; it’s all very Regency, like something out of a Jane Austen adaptation. There’s a certain Chinese aesthetic, too, but then that was true of the Regency itself.

But things don’t stay nice forever. Mal runs into Inara and her wanker client, one thing leads to another and Mal, showing his usual diplomatic skills, hits Atherton in the face for the way he speaks about Inara. Unfortunately, this is a place where the social mores of Regency aristocracy apply. Mal has just accidentally challenged Atherton to a duel. With swords. About which he knows nothing. Oh dear.

This leads to an interesting conversation between Mal and Inara during the night, as she desperately tries to teach him some rudimentary swordfighting. He’s a man of honour; he faces seemingly certain death, but he won’t run. We’re only four episodes in, but I really, really like Mal.

Meanwhile, aboard Serenity, Summer Glau gives us her cockney accent. It’s, er, a nice try, and only lapses into something approaching Australian about 50% of the time…! We get a bit of background here, too. It seems that Badger, and presumably at the other cockney geezers, hail from somewhere called “Dayton Colony”. It’s a nice touch, this.

It’s morning, and time for the duel. This sequence is even more Regency than the rest of the episode, if such a thing is possible. Mal’s improbable victory is a little contrived, perhaps, but it’s great that he gets to humiliate Atherton by not killing him. Plus, Inara’s blacklisted him, so he’ll have to rely on his charms to get any sex in future!

Even better, Harrow is impressed and agrees s to the deal. Serenity is duly loaded with cargo, and it’s cows. What else? That’s the great thing about this sci-fi Western, a spacefaring future with horses and cows!

Firefly: Serenity

“We are just too pretty for God to let us die.”

I must admit, I wouldn’t have decided to watch this on a weekday if I’d remembered how long it was, but the Firefly reviews start here. I’m going to fit in the remaining three Sarah Jane Adventures two-parters over the next few days too, but basically it’s Firefly now until it finishes, except with films on most Saturdays. More Whedon to come, though. Appropriately, my iTunes library has just been playing me Johnny Cash and Neil Young’s “From Hank to Hendrix”.

We begin with a flashback to the recent war, in which Mal and Zoe (Gina Torres) fought on the losing sides. They’re essentially Space Confederates, although Zoe’s ethnicity tells us that in this case there’s none of that slavery nastiness. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is charismatic, brave, rugged on the surface but deeply caring underneath. Zoe would follow him anywhere in spite of his flaws, but the fact that Zoe is a supremely capable and intelligent woman shows us that he’s earned that respect. Joss Whedon really gets us to invest in the characters during these first few vital minutes. We see people die nobly, and then the war is suddenly over. They’ve lost. It was all for nothing, perhaps.

The present day, and now Mal is captain of a ship, Serenity, and he and his crew make their money through not-entirely-legal means, in this case salvage. Wisely, Whedon is not telling us what year it is. Our heroes are criminals, and they have a relationship with the powers-that-be, the Alliance, which is hardly friendly. There are obvious parallels with Blake’s 7 here, even if it’s clear that planets are going to look like Southern California rather than Southern England. But we should be careful not to overstate this; Mal and his crew are far more concerned about where their meal is coming from, and are not political idealists. And the Administration, while obviously not nice, are not quite so obviously totalitarian. Also, it’s 2002, a generation later. Still, it shouldn’t surprise you that I’ve chosen to follow up Blake’s 7 (give or take the odd Sherlock) with this.

The aesthetic is also very different, and very American. The Western tropes and touches are obvious, from the costumes to the incidental music, and this underlines the frontier feel. There are more settled planets, such as the home planet of Dr. Simon Tams (Sean Maher), which stand for “back East”, but this is a rugged, frontier existence with many planets, such as the one ruled by Patience, seemingly to some extent outside the law. And when Mal states that “It’s what governments are for- to get in a man’s way”, he’s expressing the sentiments of rugged individualism which owe a lot more to the American West than to anywhere remotely close to me, here in Leicestershire. And if all that isn’t enough, there’s an obvious spinning wheel on the Serenity that evokes the feel of a steamboat.

This is a Western in space, all right, and quite rightly this dominates the aesthetic, the message and, I think, the sort of stories we’ll get. But that isn’t all that’s going on. For a start, everyone keeps occasionally speaking, I think, Mandarin, and we’re not given any subtitles. Badger (Mark Sheppard, recently in Doctor Who) is a cockney geezer crime boss who reminds me of Ronnie Kray or, indeed, Dinsdale Piranha. And then there are the Reavers, about whom we know little as yet.

We get a good, proper introduction to all of the people we shall be getting to know, so I’d better introduce them too. It makes a slightly awkward structure for this review but, in spite of Whedon’s assured script and direction, the same is true of this episode. Such is the way of first episodes.

Gina is married to Wash (Adam Tudyk), a rather witty and rather brilliant pilot whose scene with the dinosaurs is the most Joss Whedon thing ever. So far, though, there’s not a lot to him beyond that. Rather more interesting is Adam Baldwin’s violent and self-centred Jayne, a sort of working-class Avon who heavily implies he would betray Mal for the right price. Yet he clearly cares a great deal about Kaylee; Whedon rather interestingly chooses to have him at the front of the shot looking worried as it appears she might die. Even he has a softer side. He’s a great comedy character, too. Whedon manages to make the scene in which he threatens the government agent into a comedy highlight.

Inara (Morena Baccarin) is, of course, gorgeous, and has a rather interestingly ambiguous relationship with Mal. She’s a high-class “companion”, and her profession clearly enjoys a much higher degree of respectability and status than in does in the present day. There are initial clashes with Shepherd Book (Ron Glass), but I rather suspect that they’re going to be friends. The Shepherd is a mysterious one; he says he’s freshly out of the “abbey”, but he hints at a mysterious past and is a shrewd judge of character. His initial scene with Kaylee (Jewel Staite), as she entices him on to the ship is wonderful.

Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic (of course I adore her- she’s lovely!), is irrepressibly cheerful, innocent, a refreshing break from all the angst-ridden characters one sees everywhere, and interestingly perceptive about people. She knows that most of her crewmates (even Jayne) are basically nice and realises that Mal cares very deeply beneath the gruff exterior. Interestingly, we get a rather lingering shot of her eating a strawberry, which seems to be telling us that she’s a rather sensual person. I love the door to her room.

She has a bit of a thing for with Simon Tam (Sean Maher) who is, alas, from a different social class, and both literally and figuratively from a different world. Maher plays his awkwardness very well; he’s got the good looks, but sadly not the easy-going charm, of certain other Simons. Ahem. He also has a sister, River (Summer Glau) who is at this point more of a mysterious McGuffin than an actual character.

There are a lot of characters to introduce and develop, then, as well as an entire world, aesthetic and set of narrative rules. That Whedon manages to tick all these boxes while also delivering an exciting and intriguing piece of strong, character-led drama bodes very well indeed for future episodes, which will hopefully have much more space in which to breathe.

I couldn’t help but smile at the “grrr! arggh!” of Mutant Enemy. I’ll be seeing a lot of that over the next eighteen months or so.

Doctor Who: Day of the Moon

“We are not fighting an alien invasion. We’re leading a revolution.”

I’ve just looked at my notes and we’re looking at three and a half pages. This is going to be epic.

Steven Moffat does what RTD did in Last of the Time Lords, having a considerable amount of time (three months in this case) pass. It’s now July 1969, the month of the moon landing, and all three of our regulars are hunted fugitives whose time is running out. A bearded Doctor, meanwhile, languishes in Area 51 as a gloating Canton supervises the constriction of a dome of Dwarf Star Alloy (nice bit of continuity porn there), the perfect prison.

Things look pretty grim, although they also look pretty amazing. Certainly the Valley of the Gods in Utah, where Amy meets the end of the road, looks utterly sublime. Not that you’d notice as you waited to be shot, eyeing the empty body bag on the floor. Rory gets a very similar scene, this time among the spectacular scenery of the Glen Canyon Dam. River’s exit gives us a sliver of hop, though. Just before Canton is about to shoot her, she jumps from the top of a very tall building. We all know what happened when River leaps backwards from the tops of very tall buildings.

All three of them have covered their arms with tallies of the Silence they’ve sighted, a cleverly self-explanatory indication of what they’ve been up to. But the Doctor and Canton have been even cleverer. As soon as the Dwarf Star Alloy igloo is complete and the door closes, the tables turn and they spring into action. Canton was in on the plan all along, and the invisible TARDIS is right behind the Doctor. As soon as Amy and Rory get out of their body bags, and River is rescued in the usual way, we start to get some answers.

There’s some significant stuff here, too. So significant, we even get flashbacks from the mentions of the Silence last series. But we have it confirmed that you forget the Silence as soon as you hear them, they have the power of auto-hypnotic suggestion, and that, after you’ve seen them, you “sometimes feel a bit sick” but “not always”. This isn’t explained in this episode, so it’ll probably be important later. Oh, and it now seems that Amy is not pregnant.

The Doctor’s explanation of the nano-recorder, using an image of the Silent from Amy’s camera phone to trick Canton and underline his point, is very creepy indeed. Possibly even creepier is the orphanage where the little girl seems to have lives. The surroundings are creepy for a start, and then there’s all the writing on the walls. The only person present, Dr. Renfrew, is in a state of constant confusion from the constant memory wipes, still thinking 1967 is in the future and only being half-aware that he’s been in charge of just one child for years.

There’s a bit of light relief as we cut to the Doctor, having just made adjustments to Apollo 11, although there is of course a bit left over. But the creepiness intensifies in the orphanage as Amy and Canton split up. The scenes with Amy, alone, gradually realising through the increasing tally marks and her own voice message that the ceiling is crawling with Silence, is the scariest thing ever. Renfrew explains to Canton that “the child” must be cared for, because that’s what “they” said. Amy, meanwhile, sees a hatch in reality popping open. A woman with an eyepatch then pokes her head through and announces “No, I think she’s just dreaming.” How very weird. This happens shortly after Amy splits from Canton: there’s been scope for stuff to happen between then and now, let us note. We’re soon back to the usual weirdness, though. Amy enters a child’s room- presumably the little girl’s room, as it looks as though it’s in current use. There are photos of the little girl- and of Amy, holding a baby. This immediately hints at who this little girl may be.

Speaking of whom, here she is. She’s still in her spacesuit; Amy missed. Parallel to this, Canton finds a Silent. Being the capable type, he records it, and is told that “This world is ours. We have ruled it since the wheel and the fire.” Judging by the fact he immediately shoots it, we can probably assume he’s displeased to hear this. The Silence seem to be perfectly susceptible to bullets.

Taping (broadly one of Moffat’s personal tropes anyway) is central to this episode- the Doctor even urges Nixon to tape everything that happens in the Oval Office. That’ll turn out well.

The Doctor and Rory arrive to find Amy gone, but still able to communicate with them, Miss Evangelista-like, via a chip. Why has this chip been left behind to be found? Again, something which could be significant.

The Doctor’s chat with the Silent shot by Canton gives us another “Silence will fall”. What does this mean? Is it predicting the defeat of the Silence at the end of the episode, or something deeper? It’s something deeper, innit?

The little girl has disappeared, but River is able to find out a lot about the spacesuit. It can sustain its occupant through sunlight alone- no need for food, or presumably oxygen. It can hack, and communicate, and defaults to the highest authority, hence the calls to the President. The little girl seems to be human, but incredibly strong. As for where it came from, the Silence don’t make anything themselves. They’re parasites. And the Doctor insists that the only reason the Moon landing is happening now is because the Silence needed a spacesuit. What’s so important about this little girl and what do the Silence propose to do with her?

I like what’s not being said here: the Silence are getting humanity to do things by hypnotic suggestion, but all the ingenuity and brilliance is 100% human. This isn’t one of those annoying Death to the Daleks / Erich von Daniken theories which propose humans couldn’t possible be responsible for our own achievements.

That humans are in fact a bit clever is demonstrated by Canton, happily recording the Silent with Amy’s camera phone as it gloats that “We have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight.” That’ll come in handy later. River, meanwhile, has worked out that the suit could possibly move on its own, and recalls that the little girl said that the “spaceman” was “coming to eat” her.

There’s an interesting scene where Rory listens to Amy’s voice from far away- is it him or the Doctor she loves? This is unresolved as he and the Doctor have one of those chats which avoid the issue but somehow don’t. Rory remembers his two thousand years of waiting, but “not all the time”- there’s a door in his head that he can open to reach the memories. This is probably necessary to give him a realistic psychology. It’s also very fairytale.

Amy awakens, as it’s implies she has done many times over several days, in a room, surrounded by Silence. She’s told, interestingly, that “We do you honour. You will bring the Silence. But your part will soon be over.” How will she “bring the Silence?” Is this connected to her pregnancy? Is she pregnant with the little girl? Is the Silence plan something much deeper than we expect?

The Doctor arrives, and notices the continuity to The Lodger.” Very Aickman Road. Seen one of these before. Abandoned. Wonder how that happened.” I bet this is significant, too. I notice, too, that he tells River and Rory to “keep one Silent in shot at all times”, confirming that the singular form is indeed “Silent”, plural “Silence”. Sorry. I’m a bit of a grammar freak. I have to know these things.

The Doctor seems ok with River shooting people, although he again insists on not doing it himself. He’s unlike his previous incarnation, too. This Doctor ostentatiously doesn’t offer his foe a chance to surrender before carrying out his plan. He also flirts outrageously with River. His plan is very clever, though: apparently the footage of Neil Armstrong stepping on to the moon, which we’ve all seen and which countless generations will also see, carries a post-hypnotic suggestion to “kill us all on sight.” Very clever, and very ruthless. River is pretty badass, too, shooting Silence left, right and centre just like, well, the Doctor in Frontier in Space.

It’s a satisfying ending, and there are some nice codas, too. There’s a heartwarming reunion between Mr and Mrs Pond, with any though of a love triangle involving the Doctor now firmly banished. The Doctor feeds Nixon’s paranoia. Canton wants to get married. And River, returning to prison (“I escape often enough, thank you. Besides, I have a promise to live up to. You’ll understand, soon enough.” Bet that’s significant.) kisses the Doctor. For him, it’s their first. And then she realises that for her, it’s their last.

The penultimate scene has the Doctor speculating on the identity of the little girl but then changing tack: “Or we could just go off and have adventures.” This seems deliberate. Has the Doctor realised or guessed something which he wants to delay facing up to? It wouldn’t be the first time. Oh, Amy should perhaps name her baby “Schrödinger”.

Six months later… that’s quite a scene. And that was quite a story. Doctor Who doesn’t get much better than this.

Doctor Who: The Impossible Astronaut

“I’m going to need a SWAT team ready to mobilise; street level maps covering all of Florida; a pot of coffee; twelve jammie dodgers and a fez.”

Right. Well, I was going to do both this and Day of the Moon in a single post, but my notes for this episode alone stretch to more than three pages, so there’s no way I’m doing that. This is going to be long.

I watched this from a recording I made at the time, so I’ve just been briefly reminded of Don’t Scare the Hare and its cutting-edge animatronics and gripping quiz show suspense, surely the very high point of Sue Perkins’ career. My, wasn’t the world a rather odd place a few weeks ago? Anyway, we get quite a bang of an opening, don’t we? Cavaliers, The Great Escape, silent comedy- it all looks rather swish. And those days of people imagining the Doctor might possibly be asexual are a long way behind us. Time has passed and things have happened, though: Amy and Rory have set up house together, and surely that must have taken a few months; their house seems quite fully furnished. It’s made clear that this isn’t permanent, though; they’re confidently expecting the Doctor to explode back into their lives at any moment. And sure enough, in a scene resonant with Back to the Future II and, indeed, Moffat’s own Blink, someone at the door has an invitation, with a time and a place…

Elsewhere and elsewhen, in the Stormcage, River Song has received the same message. In a rather amusing comment on how often she seems to escape these days, there’s an awful lot of hoo-hah over the mere fact that she’s packing.

We get our first shot of the location scenes shot in America next, and it’s truly magnificent, as are a lot of shots to come. Amy and Rory get off a big American yellow bus into the red Utah desert with all those fantastic sticky-uppy things. And there they meet the Doctor (“I wear a Stetson now. Stetsons are cool.), and then River. It seems that was a pistol she was packing. And her opinions of the Doctor and headgear are as firmly expressed as ever.

The Doctor’s being a bit cryptic, though. He was 908 when Amy and Rory last met him; now he’s 1,103. Not only that, but he seems to remember a lot of the events from River’s diary. And he says ominous sounding things, like “I’ve been running faster than I’ve ever run. I’ve been running my whole life. Now it’s time for me to stop.”

The scene switches from a diner (how American!) to a picnic by a lake, surrounded by some breathtaking landscape. The Doctor, sadly, still needs educating about wine. But Amy sees a watching figure: a Silence. (An aside: my hearing is a bit dodgy and I watch pretty much all telly with subtitles when I can. The subtitles always have the Silence as “the Silence”, not “The Silents”: singular “Silence”, plural “Silence”. Are subtitles canon?). And then an older bloke in a car pulls up nearby and waits.

A figure in a late 1960s NASA spacesuit emerges from the waters like a Sea Devil, and the Doctor sees that the time has come. “Stay back,” he warns Amy, Rory and River. “Whatever happens now, you do not interfere.” So the astronaut shoots him point-blank. Twice. He starts to regenerate. The astronaut shoots him again. Dead. At this point the bloke in the distance (Canton Everett Delaware III, who has also received an invitation) helpfully assures us that the Doctor is “most certainly dead.” And Amy, in voicing aloud the clone / duplicate hypothesis, seems to have ensured it can’t happen. Oh dear. It’s all looking rather unambiguous.

Except that, back in the diner, they find a fourth envelope. And the Doctor. It’s his earlier self- he’s only 909- but River slaps him anyway. We now have a situation where Amy, River, and Rory can’t tell the Doctor what just happened in case bad timey-wimey stuff happens. This is a problem, as the Doctor is bound to notice that they’re hiding something big. He does. And he’s not pleased. In fact he’s only convinced by Amy swearing on fish fingers and custard, as you do. And yet… surely the Doctor would have correctly guessed what this would mean? He’s not the type to be satisfied with not knowing, and surely he already knows enough for the possibility to have occurred to him?

In 1969, a young Canton has been called in by President Nixon. Tricky Dicky is being telephoned, every day, by a child who’s afraid of the “spaceman”. The child seems to be called Jefferson Hamilton Adams. Oh, and the Doctor is taking notes, right there in the Oval Office, which gets quite a reaction. But the Doctor, soon joined by the Legs, the Nose and Mrs Robinson, is soon able to get everyone on his side by Being Very Clever. Midnight this ain’t.

That doesn’t mean they’re safe though: Amy sees a Silence again, and remembers the earlier time. Does this imply that the earlier time was the first time she’d seen one? She doesn’t wait long until the next time either; there’s a Silence in the ladies’ loo. A male one, too. What a perv. It’s quite horribly effective how the other woman in the room sees it, forgets, sees it, forgets, and is then dismissively and shockingly killed by a lightning effect similar to that we saw at the end of The Lodger. Amy keeps her wits about her; she takes a pic on her phone, and the Silence doesn’t seem to know what it is any more than would anyone from 1969. There’s an interesting exchange, too. Amy must tell the Doctor “What he must know. And what he must never know.” Interesting. I wonder if we’ve all been understanding this correctly at all? The vague wording suggests some prior conditioning. And it seems that Amy is being told to actively tell the Doctor both what he must know and what he must not, instead of just telling him one thing but not another. Am I reading too much into this?

The Doctor traces where in Florida the calls are coming from (somewhere close to Cape Kennedy), and drops heavy hints at Canton that he should come along for the ride. He knows, of course, that it’s an obvious trap, but it’s intriguing; why is so much ultra-modern, yet indisputably NASA, technology found around here? There’s a manhole cover, too, which River decides to investigate. She’s “quite the screamer”, apparently. Ooh er.

River sees loads and loads of Silence just underneath, and then returns to pronounce the all clear. Interestingly, though, she goes back underground, this time with Rory, and feels momentarily sick. Is this significant?

These tunnels are “really, really old”, and have been here for “centuries” and run underneath the entire planet. Yet no one has ever noticed them, implying one of Moffat’s perception filters. Yet, if that is the case, how come the Doctor & Co noticed this one?

River’s conversation with Rory here is most interesting and tragic. When she first met the Doctor, this mysterious and unflappable stranger, he knew everything about her, and she found him irresistible. But every time she meets him, he knows her less and less: the Doctor’s confrontation with her earlier, in which he made it clear he didn’t trust her, must have really hurt. She knows that one day the Doctor won’t recognise her at all, and “I think it’s going to kill me.” Certainly ironic in the light of Silence in the Library. Speaking of which, about that title… you don’t think? Naaah…

They emerge into a control room exactly the same as the one in The Lodger. They’re surrounded by Silence, all identically dressed. Why are the Silence wearing suits, by the way? Do they dress like humans, or is it the other way around?

Amy and Canton have an interesting little chat too, and Amy says that she hasn’t seen the Doctor for “a while”- I’m asking this a lot, but is this significant? She then chooses one precise moment, just after they all hear the little girl’s voice, to tell the Doctor that she’s apparent. The exact timing of this bombshell certainly is significant: Amy even says that “It has to be now.”

Inside the spacesuit is a little girl. And Amy shoots her. The credits roll. And... one of the actors was playing “The Silent”. You should probably ignore what I said earlier about the Silence / Silents thing. Subtitles might not be canon after all…

That was well good.