Cucumber: Episode 2

"Uncle Lance says you never take it up the bum!"

This episode is perhaps a little shorter on the flashes of brilliance than the last one, but it is again a joy to experience Russell T Davies' writing again. The theme of the week is clear, and stated at the start with the "Henry test" of looking at your partner's last twenty texts- what are the boundaries of faithfulness? At what point does lust for another person, or flirting, make you unfaithful to your partner? Are Henry and Lance still together? This is awkwardly ambiguous. Yet for the younger crowd of Dean and Freddie such ambiguity is happily accepted.

There is a gap between Henry's young hosts in terms of both age and social class- but perhaps we should not separate the two, in our age of austerity which is aimed at the young. It isHenry's  generation which has the property and the good jobs. Perhaps this explains Freddue's more-or-less open contempt.

Oh, and I was wrong about Danny, Lance's friend with the casual homophobia; he's clearly gay and repressed, and Lance clearly likes him.

This episode is just as funny as the last one, and most of the best humour revolves around Henry's sister Cleo,who is fantastic and behaves like a real person. Her reactions to Henry's plight are nuanced and not as one would expect from a character in a drama.

RTD is brilliant at how he shows characterisation- the dialogue, the use of modern social media in TV drama and, of course, people not communicating properly with each other- the main theme of this series. It's all very Marshall McLuhan; the medium is the message.

Cucumber: Episode 1

"It's not my fault they went and invented it."

I'm conscious that the only Russell T Davies scripts I've ever blogged have been Doctor Who. So I should say, for the sake of balance, that I've seen (and enjoyed) Casanova and The Second Coming and, indeed, Dark Season. I haven't, however, seen Queer as Folk which, I suspects, puts me at a slight disadvantage in that I cannot discuss Cucumber in relation to it.

Meh. Anyway, this is RTD's much-heralded "More Gay Men" project, a return to a style of drama grounded in relationships and human miscommunication rather than the science fiction he's written in the recent past. And it is, of course, brilliant. I'd forgotten how much I love his style; the lightness of touch as a means to approach heavy themes, and his signature brilliant dialogue. RTD once explained to Charlie Brooker that his characters, like real people, never quite listen to what the other person is saying; dialogue should not get "ping pong". He practises what he preaches to brilliant effect here as Sunil gets a distracted Henry to let him copy that fateful essay.

But let's step back a bit. Henry is 46, comically grumpy and in a more or less sexless relationship with Lance. He represents the older generation of gay men, who have had to struggle with AIDS and a more overt homophobia, and to whom recent advances like equal marriage are somewhat bewildering. In contrast we have the much younger Dean, who has things much easier in terms of both social attitudes and easy sex.

This is the story, more or less, of how Henry's life fall apart so in the space of twenty-four hours. It looks as though he's lost his relationship and his career, in both cases through an awkward failure to communicate clearly. This basic plot plays out with plenty of wit and hilarity to distract us, as always, from the pessimism about the human condition that always lies beneath RTD's work. 

Vincent Franklin deserves praise for making the prickly and waspish Henry likeable enough to work as a protagonist yet believable for us to despair at his attitudes. Perhaps his attitude has been shaped by his life, though; he's clearly not comfortable with the idea that he can now get married, he's only half joking in his ambivalence to other gay men, and he's never gone all out and had full penetrative sex. He still has one foot in the more repressive era of his youth, days of Section 28 and homophobic tabloids.

And yet we also get funny scenes like the neighbour politely asking him not to wank  where her children can see, and the man with yellow spunk. And yet both of these turn out to be tinged with tragedy.

I'm looking forward to next week. I don't pretend to be any more plugged into gay culture than the next Guardian reading heterosexual liberal, but I'm enjoying this as a drama that is both fun and has something to say. I've missed RTD.

Doctor Who: Kill the Moon

"That's what you do with aliens, isn't it? Blow them up?"

Hmm. I didn't much like this one, and yet it got all the big things right. I loved the plot, I loved the beats of the story- and yet it didn't quite come off. The problem, I think, is that both the setting and central conceit with the fixed point in time just feel like a retread of The Waters of Mars. It must be said, too, that, yes, I quite like the more slowly paced style of this season, but this episode dragged.

It's the Moon (played by Lanzarote) in 2049 and not, as some reading pre-publicity would have up believe, Sarn (played by Lanzarote). People have stopped going into space because they can't be arsed, a bit like The Seeds of Death. Things have been getting desperate, the moon had been getting heavier and disrupting gravity, and all humanity has to play with is one antique space shuttle, the last few nukes and some piss-or astronauts. It's a very unglamorous future. 

Meanwhile, at Coal Hill School, the Doctor decides to take young Courtney Woods to the Moon to cheer her up, as you do. Clara is not entirely sure this is wise. The Doctor advises Courtney that there's to be "no hanky-panky", as JN-T once famously declared. Oh, and later on the Doctor gives us a Troughtonesque "When I say run, run." And Courtney became President of the USA and "met this bloke called Blonovitch". Lots of references to old stories, and the reason I mention them is to point out that they are not particularly from missing episodes, contrary to many current online theorists who suppose that this season is full of clues to a forthcoming announcement of missing episodes by Philip Morris later this year. That may or may not happen, but im very sceptical about any clues being inserted into the season's scripts. It just ain't happening, folks.

On a more contemporary note, Capafdi's Doctor is forever being asked "Who made you the boss?". And the bacteria-spiders look good, although in close-up it's a shame they used CGI instead of a model. 

The central moral dilemma- the moon is an egg, and humanity has the moral dilemma of actually killing the innocent baby or risking extinction, is not one I can identify with, though. What parallel with any real world dilemma is there here, exactly? And arguably Clara is wrong: surely the extinction of billions of humans and an entire planet justifies the unfortunate sacrifice of one life. 

I don't blame Clara for lashing out at the Doctor and storming out of the TARDIS. She confides in Danny Pink, with his warning from last episode about the Doctor being a dangerously charismatic officer coming home to roost much sooner than expected. But, as Danny points out, she's angry now. How will she feel when she calms down? I don't think this is the end of her arc. This feels like unfinished business. And the scene also hints at unexplained depths to Danny Pink- again.

Jenna Coleman, incidentally, is amazing here.

This is probably my least favourite episode of the season so far, then- derivative, and based on a moral dilemma too far removed from anything that could possibly happen to possibly bear the dramatic weight that's been placed upon it. That's a problem.