Doctor Who: The Giggle

 "I gambled with God and made him a Jack-in-the-box..."

Yes, I know: I, of all peopole, am a day l with his ate for Doctor Who. But, much as my Who fix is an imperative, a necessity,  a matter of life and death... yeah, my child comes first. Anyway, this is going to be a long one. But let's just start by saying that it's a tour de force of writing, characterisation, direction and production, like both of its predecessors this 60th. We even get Mel, getting to be a genius working for UNIT, Bonnie Langford being brilliant, and even a potted history of life from Sabalom Glitz onwards... and is it hinted that they were an actual couple? Bizarrely, though it shouldn't, I think that sort of works. Anyway...

Love the pre-titles with the Toymaker in 1925 with his creepy shop, the John Logie Baird stuff, and the captivatingly evil charisma from Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker. I like the way the Toymaker is called out for a casually racist comment that exactly echoes one made to Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Time and Space, surely a deliberate nod. It's also perhaps a nod to the hints of archaic racist tropes that hover around the character; if you're not sure what I mean, Google the words "Celestial" and "Chinese". I'll wait. Incidentally, I love the brief colourised clips of William Hartnell and Michael Gough. 

Of course, The Celestial Toymaker is, I have to say, total pants, just game after game with no real sense of drama or purpose. The games here are so much different, and creepy. That poor man made into a marionnette (not saved, I note, from this existential body horror), and Donna's being attacked by the family of ventriloquist dummies. Brr. The Toymaker may not have been a great villain in 1966 (he really wasn't!), but he is now. The concept was always potentially great. Now, at last, it's been done properly. And I love how RTD refuses to do anything so mundane as explain what the Toymaker is. The whole point is that he's beyond all logic and explanation, and therefore terrifying.

Even better, this episode is about something. People acting so belligerently in 2023 is simply the Toymaker having people behave in real life as they behave online, a nice touch. And the anti-Zeedex conspiracy theories, with the obvious subtext... yeah, chef's kiss. The Toymaker even declares during the climax how he loves the capacity of humanity to lose themselves in their gaming headphones (not much of a gamer myself in that sense. Pokemon Go, on the other hand...), plus "the mind games- the dating, the ghosting". This is the perfect way of using fantasy to get away with social commentary. Oh RTD, how we've missed you.

Anyway, we get UNIT again. Still led by Kate. Shirley is still there. Are we, perhaps, looking at a recurring UNIT gang, 70s style? Potentially including Donna (I love how she casually gets the job!) and even Mel? It's an exciting prospect, one of many arising from this episode.

The conclusion, with the bi-regeneration and two Doctors, really shouldn't work. Describe it out of context and it's terrible. Except, with RTD writing... it isn't. It's brilliant. Ncuti Gatwa is superb, of course, but more on him at Christmas. The Fourteenth Doctor is tired, full of the weight of history, and facing burnout. The Toymaker's puppet show illustrates it nicely... the guilt of Amy and Rory, of Clara, of Bill, of the Flux, of that thing last episode with the salt. As Donna hasn't stopped telling him, from the very start, he needs to stop. And now he has a family, on Earth, which is lovely, much as he keeps taking people on naughty little TARDIS trips. It's a nice touch that Mel, being an orphan, gets included too. And, being that this is a second Earth exile of sorts, it's a nice little Easter egg that the Doctor tells a little anecdote about the planet Delphon, where they communicate with their eyebrows. That joke is fifty-four years old next month...!

Much as I'd say the chance of the Fourteenth Doctor and the Nobles (sadly Wilf had just a cameo, understandably...) reappearing in some way is pretty much 100%. Good. Because the characterisation has been exquisite, not least with the Doctor accepting his regeneration without self-indulgence this time. 

This is pretty much perfection. The bar has been set high... but I've every confidence that Ncuti Gatwa's debut is totally going to smash it.

It's a Sin: Part 1

 "You haven't got a parrot, have you?"

Russell T. Davies, after a few quiet years since leaving Doctor Who (alas, said quietness for tragic personal reasons) has not only been very much back over the last few years but is arguable at the very peak of his career right now. Cucumber was perhaps underappreciated, as was Years and Years, but few deny that A Very English Scandal was sublime. If this first episode is any guide (and I'm told reviews are raving from those who've binged the whole thing on All4; I'm soing it week by week), this could be the best thing he's ever done.

RTD has always said he wanted to return to gay themes in recent years, and this series confronts the elephant in the room: AIDS, which destroyed and traumatised a generation of gay men through the cruel double whammy of a horrifying disease and the added cruelty of society. I'm sure we will see much overt homophobia in later episodes (RTD has already shown with truthfully subtle dialogue the casual racism), but just as cruel is the fact that same sex relationships must be covert, informal, unrecognised, existing only at the margins of society. 

We see this, horrifyingly, in the person of Henry, played superbly by Neil Patrick Harris. He's lived with his partner (that unsatisfactory word) Juan Pablo for thirty years, a blissfully married couple in all but name. And yet, when they both become sick with this mysterious new gay plague (and yes, this all has resonance in early 2021, with our plague being less easy to ignore for most than the plague of forty years earlier), Juan Pablo's mother takes him "home" to Portugal and they must both die without seeing each other again. Equally horrifying is the sight of Henry, alone in a ward to himself, food left at the door, with no one approaching unless wearing what we have over the past year come to refer to as full PPE.

This episode is about introducing the characters, however, although not without a little foreboding. RTD is making us like these very human, flawed, likeable individuals before putting them through the wringer. We focus on three young gay men- Richie, student turned actor; Roscoe, who has fled the worst kind of religious fundamenalism with his Nigerian family set on "curing" him; and Colin, a shy young tailor from RTD's part of the world. There's also the very lovely Jill, the heart of the Pink Palace, but this episode shos lots of joyous, hedonistic sex, silliness and young people behaving as young people should, ignorant (and in denial) of what's coming.

Worryingly, we end with our three principals expanding on their dreams for the future. Let's hope at least some of them have one.

This is utterly sublime television. RTD makes it look effortless. I already feel I know and care about these people, and am worried.

Starship Troopers (1997)

“Fresh meat to the grinder, eh?”

I saw this film once before, and loved it, twenty-odd years ago. But I only read Robert Heinlein’s original novel a couple of years ago, on the train, during my commute, where I do all my reading these days. And the novel is a different beast. It follows the story of Johnny Nico, yes, but doesn’t concern itself with just one war and is as much world-building as narrative. Most extraordinary, it seems to expound a worldview that is quite extraordinary, and which is assumed to be more playing with ideas than reflecting the supposedly libertarian views of its author.

These views are, to put it mildly, not remotely libertarian. I say that as a radical liberal, a devotee of Lilburne, Locke, John Stuart Mill, Keynes, Beveridge and Henry George. Personally I’m left of centre while avowedly not in any way socialist, seeing the need for the state to free people from poverty in terms of individual liberty; unlike right wing libertarians I don’t see this as a silly abstract opposition between the state and the private sector. I’m the kind of libertarian that would support, say, the state legislating to prevent private organisations from putting cameras in employee toilets. The point is, as a radical liberal I’m left of centre, very much unlike Heinlein, but although I prefer not to use the word “libertarian” (it has right-wing connotations these days), I certainly am one.

And, if the novel truly reflects Heinlein’s views, he most certainly was not one. The classroom scene in the film- expanded in the novel to “history and moral philosophy”- justifies its ideology that only soldiers or former soldiers deserve citizenship as being because voting is an exertion of power and this a violent act, and violence gets things done. I don’t agree, to put it mildly. I’m all in favour of the idea that freedom isn’t free, that free citizens must be prepared to fight and die for that freedom, as in 1939. But to make that freedom conditional would pervert such a noble gesture into cynical self-interest; we would be fighting for personal advancement, not to defend a freedom we would not have. Heinlein seems to support discipline and violence as ends unto themselves, whereas it is of course nonsense to fetishise then like this; discipline and force are morally neutral. It’s the ends they are used for that matter. And I firmly believe that a truly free society would fight better. We should be Athens, not Sparta. And yes; I’m aware that soldiers are free to leave at any time without their citizenship and that the society appears to be a true meritocracy. It still isn’t free.

Anyway, the film, which is awesome. Obviously, Hollywood can not possibly get away with espousing such views and the film wisely takes a more critical look. Paul Verhoeven is absolutely the right choice as director. The film is filled, from the start, with spoof military propaganda (and others, subtly expanding this world of psychic powers and summary rough justice) which satirises this kind of knee-jerk militarism. Yes, this kind of thing repeats the same trick from RoboCop but it is, I think, the right way to frame the film. It’s also the right decision, cinematically, to structure the film as more of a narrative focusing on Johnny, his friends, and the love rectangle with Carmen, poor Diz, and Zander. And the bugs look awesome in a way they would not have done a few years later with CGI development. I’m sure those expecting a straight ahead s I-do romp would be disappointed, but this is a film rightly focused on ideas and satirical humour as much as glorious violence and sex- it’s notable that military service is gender blind, society seems gender blind too, and that both sexes shower together.

This is a well-made, genuinely gripping film with no slow moments, yet one which is careful to present Heinlein’s ideas without endorsing them. An absolute triumph.