Doctor Who: The Star Beast

 "You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of thirty-five... and no further!"

SPOILERS, obvs.

Oh, RTD, how I've missed you. It's so many years since I've watched an episode of Doctor Who with characters who act and talk about real people, and whom we care about. Yes, we know Donna, Sylvia and Shaun, and that's a nice shortcut, but RTD really can write people, and family dynamics, and those little bits of character subtlety.

That, more than anything, is why this episode is so bloody good. The actual alien threat plot is not the point, cool though it is to see Miriam Margolyes voice Beep the Meep- it's literally an off-the-shelf plot from a very early issue of Doctor Who Weekly for which Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons get credited. No; what matters is Donna, and fixing the cruelty done to her in wiping her memory of all the cool adventures she had. Coming right on the heels of Tales of the TARDIS, which returned the memories stolen from Jamie and Zoe by the Time Lords, Donna now gets similar treatment.

Even better, the way Donna's memories are returned is not a cop out. The moment is earned, and comes from real, human drama centring on Donna's Daughter Rose (nice name). I'm a cis middle-aged man, and it's not my place to comment on what it must be like to be a trans person in the UK in 2023, a nation blighted by culture wars and whose prime minister has made a speech saying people should not be "bullied" for denying trans peoole exist. But the characterisation here feels real- Donna is a wonderful, loving mother and, while Sylvia sometimes gets things wrong, she loves her grandaughter and tries hard. But making all this the resolution is so bloody clever. 

It's so wonderfully nostalgic seeing David Tennant and the whole gang again, both in front of the camera and behind it- this was the first time this year I'd actually watched telly live, as broadcast, albeit on iPlayer- but Doctor Who (aside from General Elections) is literally the only prpgramme for which I treat iPlayer as anything other than a streaming service. Yet it's not just nostalgia. This is bloody good, contemporary telly, calculated to appeal to a general audience. The script is witty and human, the budget looks enormous, and Rachel Talalay's creative direction looks literally cinematic. Plus, the climactic scenes with the Doctor and Donna feature what is literally the best and most fun technobabble ever.

We get to see UNIT, and new character Shirley, UNIT's newest scientific adviser who fires missiles from her wheelchair, is very cool, and is played by the awesome Ruth Madeley from Years and Years. We get teased about both Kate Lethbridge Stewart... but we don't get to see them, not yet. Likewise, Beep the Meep hints cryptically at a "boss", but so far there's no big, Bad Wolf-like continuing thread. Oh, and the new TARDIS interior is at once cool, enormous, oozing high production values and... blatantly based on the DWM comic strip from the early '90s, which is certainly no bad thing.

Doctor Who is back. Properly. Oh yes.

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

“We’re in Twin Peaks here...”

Well, it had to happen at some point in a long-running franchise like this. This is bloody awful. Yes, it's a nice poster. But beyond that I'm struggling to think of anything positive.

What went wrong? After all, the film is directed (and scripted) by a young Rachel Talalay, a respected and successful Doctor Who director in recent years, and at this time a veteran of the franchise who was finally getting to helm an instalment. Yet, it must be said, she doesn’t do a good job and it’s hard to square this with her excellent later work.

Partly, I suppose, it’s the times. It’s 1991 and early CGI is beginning to rear its head, something which dates a film far more than the physical effects of earlier instalments. Perhaps it’s that the plot isn’t very coherent or clearly told. Perhaps it’s the amazement over the fact that an actor like Yaphet Kotto is lowering himself to such drivel. But, if this was truly intended as the final film in the franchise, it’s a shocking way to end. There are no scares. There’s no suspense. Freddy Krueger is reduced to a silly Daffy Duck-style figure with no remaining menace. What were they thinking? And the characterisation? Well, there’s Carlos, whose sole personality trait is “wears hearing aids”, and the others are even more generic. The whole thing is incoherent, and even the set pieces are just silly- the first one is a pastiche of The Wizard of Oz and they don’t get much better, although the hearing aid scene had a certain ghoulish fascination for me. It’s also quite nostalgic to be reminded of what they were like back then.

Meh. It doesn’t get more disappointing than this. It’s a crying shame after a surprisingly quality franchise up to now, but we are now leaping headlong over the proverbial predatory fish.

Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time

“You’re the first Dalek that ever got naked for me!”

It’s a brave move to start the Christmas special, where a greater number of viewers than usual are watching, many of them digesting large late lunches and just a little bit on the merry side, with “Previously on Doctor Who...” and a load of monochrome clips from 1966. But Moffat, in perhaps the last script he will ever contribute to the programme, dares to do it. Right after bringing back the Cybermen from The Tenth Planet he shows us bits of the story. Then William Hartnell morphs into an outstanding David Bradkey and, for the next hour, everything is brilliant.

There’s a lot more going on than a multi-Doctor story, of course, but it’s a joy to see one from the man who penned Time Crash. The repartee between the two Doctors is magnificent, and the running joke of the new Doctor’s admonishment of the old Doctor’s casual sexism is both nice social commentary and a nifty bit of foreshadowing. Yes, I raised an eyebrow at how the old Doctor- refusing, like the new Doctor, to renew himself- had a flicker of modern day orange regeneration energy, but some things are inevitable. But there are things to squee about- the old TARDIS, inside and out, “the Ship”. And, after all these years of Doctors with a number as a prefix, it’s great to see the Doctor again.

It’s an indulgence, perhaps, for Moffat’s old mate Mark Gatiss to be cast in his swansong, but appropriate; he excels as a man snatched from the point of death and knowing he must return. And it’s inevitable, appropriate and cleverly done that Bill should return. And the seeming enemy is linked to the Weapon Forgers of Villengard- a lovely little reference to The Doctor Dances and Moffat’s first ever story for Doctor Who. Then again, I’m tempted to see the plot resolution- there’s no real baddie, just a rather nice scheme to duplicate the Matrix on Gallifrey and ensure the memory of everyone who has ever lived is uploaded just before the point of death- as being a call back to the sort of plot Moffat used to write in the early days.

It’s nice to see the Doctors discuss their mutual fears of their impending regenerations, and it’s great to see the truly wonderful chat between Bill and the old Doctor; never mind what he was running from when he stole the TARDIS; where was he running to? The answer is that he wanted to find out why it was that good prevails, and he doesn’t understand that the reason is him, the wandering God, the perfect encapsulation of the outgoing showrunner’s philosophy.

We also get the return of an old friend from Into the Dalek, references to RTD’s old stomping ground of New Earth as a nice little tribute to Moffat’s predecessor, and of course a great big tribute to the Hartnell years to make clear that Moffat is in no doubt as to what he is; a custodian, standing on the shoulders of others, making his own huge contribution, and handing the show on to others. He’s undoubtedly a name to be spoken of on a par with Robert Holmes. If we never see him on the programme again, we shall miss him. And let us not forget the sheer personal sacrifice of dedicating seven very busy years to Doctor Who. Steven Moffat, we salute you.

There’s a nice further twist, of course- the Captain is one Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart. But then it’s on to the regeneration- with touching goodbyes from the uploaded memories of Bill, er, Nardole, and Clara, who manages to restore the Doctor’s memories. It’s a nice little update of the farewells from a Doctor’s companions prior to regeneration that was so fashionable in the ‘80s.

But the Doctor must die alone. And, ancient though he is, and weary of mourning so many friends and loved ones, he convinces himself that the universe sort of needs him and, after a brief farewell speech that owes a fair bit to Terrance Dicks he finally regenerates. The regeneration itself is awesome, but so is Peter Capaldi. Magnificent, and one of the great Doctors. And then... Jodie Whittaker gets to utter just two words and her first thirty-odd seconds are very, very Matt Smith.

Magnificent. Truly magnificent. Although I have no idea what the slightly sozzled not-we made of that...

Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls

"Is it wrong that I..."

"Yes, very!"

Wow. That was an emotional rollercoaster and no mistake, and probably the best Doctor Who season finale since the institution started back in 2005. It's also an episode chick full of fan lore, Moffatisms and, well, stuff. There's a lot to talk about.

We begin with a typically Moffat pre-titles with fields, skies, farmhouses and horse-driven carts all inside the same spaceship (a Moffat trope right from The Time of Angels), and the terrifying spectacle of partly cybernised people being used as scarecrows. The Doctor, Nardole the Master and Missy share a few witticisms before they, and Cyberman Bill, end up together in the farmhouse where the two Masters exchange some glorious dialogue in some truly joyous scenes while Bill (shown as she sees herself) comes to terms with the awful body horror of what she has become. These two sequences showcase two separate types of superlative writing prowess from the Moff.

There's a superb reason why they can't all return to the TARDIS- time dilation; if they travel the full 4,000 miles then the Cybermen will have had millennia to prepare, so there's nothing for it but to sit and wait for the inevitable assault, and for the Doctor to be heroic for the sake of it- "without hope, without witness, without reward." The Doctor gets another one of those magnificent soliloquies that Peter Capaldi first showed himself to be so good at with The Zygon Inversion, and it's interesting to see that the Master doesn't care but Missy is, at least, equivocal.

So the Doctor and Bill, who knows her humanity is slowly being eroded and doesn't want to live without being her (there's a thought, and a horribly modern one- Cybermen as a metaphor for dementia), agree to the suicide mission of staying behind to blow up with the Cybermen while Nardole gets everyone away to survive for a while until the next attack.

The Masters get a delightfully mad ending as Missy fatally stabs the Master with a hug and he shoots her after she reveals she's off to join the Doctor. The Master is off to his TARDIS to regenerate; she is apparently too dead to regenerate, as some ways of being killed, apparently, just arbitrarily do that. This is fooling no one, of course; the Master's been deader than this. (S)he'll be back.

So we come to the Doctor- also fatally wounded, although we saw a flicker of regeneration energy even earlier- and Bill in their last stand against the Cybermen, some of whom, disappointingly, have "evolved" to be more modern like and use the existing costumes. But we get a moment of pure fanwank as the Doctor names "Telos, Voga, Planet 14". There's also an earlier bit of retcon that makes me uncomfortable while we're on the subject of fanwank; the Doctor seems to say that the Cybermen arose independently on "Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14" and, yes, Marinus, in a bizarre and gloriously fanwanky reference to the DWM comic strip The World Shapers, penned by Grant Morrison, no less. Not sure I like this suggestion that not all Cybermen are fundamentally Mondasian, and the idea seems to contradict dialogue in Tomb of the Cybermen anyway.

Still, Cyberman Bill dies and... Bill still exists, because of some clever and retrospectively well-seeded long term plot cleverness from way back in The Pilot meaning Bill gets to be herself again and travel the universe in a puddle with the girl she loves. It's clever, it's superbly written, it made Mrs Llamastrangler and me cry and it's essentially brilliant. But, well, it feels like a cop out. After Clara this is twice in a row that Moffat has stepped back from properly killing off a companion at the last minute and it feels like a lack of bravery. Perhaps I'm being unfair; it's still rather brilliant, and would probably feel different if it wasn't for Clara, not to mention that a companion dying would have overshadowed a busy episode. Nonetheless, there's a slight feeling of cop out.

And so we come to what all the signs are telling us is a regeneration; the Doctor recites his predecessors' last lines, he's lying in the TARDIS as he was at the end of The Tenth Planet, the Cloister Bell is sounding. And yet the Doctor is resisting regeneration through sheer willpower and has, I suspect, been doing so for quite some time. And then Moffat throws a curveball as (in the Doctor's head?) the bloody first Doctor appears, played by David Bradley. This is, to put it mildly, hugely exciting, and may indicate that the Christmas Special may be a leisurely examination of the concept of regeneration, i.e. mortality, casting the Doctor as a kind of Scrooge figure? Whatever, I can't wait.

And yes, I know I have a couple of little criticisms, but they in no way detract from the sheer brilliance and genius of one of Moffat's finest pieces of writing. Yes, like all prolific writers he has his tropes, but that's a strength, not a weakness. Steven Moffat is right up there with Whittaker, Holmes and Davies as one of the finest writers ever to grace this programme.

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time

"Hello. I'm Doctor Who."

Wow. Not sure what the Andrew Marvell quote has with anything, and I did English at uni, but this episode is extraordinary from the initial teasing (apparent) regeneration sequence, with us knowing full well that Peter Capaldi is around until Christmas, to the final, utterly wrenching body horror of our discovery that Bill has been turned fully into a Tenth Planet Cyberman.

The episode starts, though, with a few minutes of fantastic dialogue between a TARDIS crew that has never had such chemistry, and the addition of a seemingly reformed but utterly magnificent Missy is the icing on the cake. Her dialogue is witty, metatextual and glorious. But then the storytelling is equally and non-linearly magnificent as the Doctor tests out Missy's Doctoring skills with a distress call from a 400 mile long ship falling into a black hole, where time passes more slowly at one end of the ship than the other. We get alot of necessary exposition, Bill fulfilling the companion's narrative role here, as the Doctor explains his history with Missy in flashback, Bill gets shot, and... for those of us who've listened to some Big Finish, it all goes very Spare Parts, in the best way possible.

This is, of course, revealed to be a Mondasian ship, and the (ahem) genesis of the Cybermen, as it's very nicely put by John Simm's Master, superbly revealed after having played a friendly character in prosthetics all episode long without fooling me. It's all done quite brilliantly, and John Simm's Master looks positively Delgado for the first multi-Master story. The implausibility of Mondas being Earth's twin planet is nicely glossed over too. Thi is an episode to truly remind us of Steven Moffat's considerable talents.

All this and we get Venusian Aikido too. We're being spoiled. This is, and I know I keep saying it, extraordinary even by the very high standards of what we can surely start calling the best season since Season 27.

Tank Girl (1995)

"I'm gonna need a microscope and tweezers, it's like, uh..."

Don't get me wrong; this is a B-movie, with all that entails, even though it feels strange to be talking about B-movies as late as 1995. But a B-movie can still be awesome, and this splendid feminist cult classic is no exception.

Yes, the budget looks cheap, but that doesn't stop future Doctor Who helmer Rachel Talalay from directing it stylishly and not being unafraid to use bits of comic strip and even cartoon to transition between scenes. I haven't read the original comic book but the film certainly sells it well, much as this post-apocalyptic future of water scarcity and feminist subtext feels very 2000 AD.

Lori Petty is superb as the wittiest, most double-entendre spouting pro-sex feminist hero in all of cinema, and Malcolm McDowell chews scenery as only he can, but Naomi watts is also superb as the initially beaten down Jet Girl who slowly learns how to kick ass in this world of cruel and unimpressive men. The soundtrack, which boasts the likes of Devo, Hole, L7, Portishead and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, is as awesome as they gets, much though it leads me to reflect mournfully on how plugged in I was back in '95 and how these days I'm, well, not.

The film is superb, at its heart a film about real darkness, cruelty, abuse and despair yet rising above it with the power of joyful wit. It has the feminism of Riot Grrl, "bollocks" in an American accent , pimped-up tanks and Iggy Pop as a silly masked mutant. What more can you ask for?

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.

Doctor Who: Hell Bent

I"I insist upon my past!"

This is a brilliant season finale and a brilliant proper farewell to Clara, yes. That would be enough to make it brilliant. But there's more. Much, much more. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I much prefer the littler, more character based stories to the big overblown epics: give me The Rescue over The Dalek Invasion of Earth any day. And Moffat clearly agrees. So much so that he takes the big, epic Gallifrey story we've expected for so long, only to swat it away in favour of a nice little intimate character piece.

And it's blatant. Yes, we have Gallifrey, the Citadel, the Chancellery Guards and the Matrix. We even get Donald Sumptrr, no less, as Rassilon. Except... the first twenty minutes of the story consists of the Doctor emphatically rejecting the epic power of the Time Lords in both the narrative and the wider mythology of Doctor Who: his relationship with his companion is far more important than all this fanwank.

Hence the Doctor assumes charge in Gallifrey through doing did all, by his Time War reputation alone. Hence the fact that Rassilon, that iconic figure of Time Lord mythology, played by Donald Sumpter in a real casting coup... is casually expelled from the narrative at a very early point on the episode. This episode is about Clara's death, the Doctor's hubris at refusing to accept it (very The Waters of Mars), and how this is making shades of the old War Doctor seep through. And it's Clara who saves the day. "Run, you clever boy, and be a Doctor".

Not that there isn't some glorious fanwankery, of course. Most brilliant is our first male-to-female regeneration, which has a nice transsexual subtext. Also, Ohica and the Sisterhood of Karn are back for absolutely no reason other than that they're cool, which is absolutely right. It's 2015, and Doctor Who still shows the unmistakable influence of Terrance Dicks, as it should.

The real emotional and dramatic centre of the episode is its second half, from the point at which Clara is extracted to the Matrix from a point just before her death. She's trapped between moments, with no heartbeat, and will eventually have to be returned to her timeline, and death. From this point, Gallifrey and all its flummery are but a MacGuffin in the service of Clara's relationship with her mortality and the Doctor's hubris in bending the laws of time in forever postponing her return to her death.

Clara is horrified to hear that the Doctor spent 4.5 billion years in the confession dial. For her. She, unlike him, appreciates that she has to die. It's in the nature of things, and she has had an amazing life.

The ending is inspired. The Doctor and Clara run away in a TARDIS just like throne he stole all those years ago, with an uber-retro interior exactly as designed by Peter Brachaki, right down to that thingy off the ceiling that was quietly dropped after An Unearthly Child. The Doctor has no solution to Clara's mortality other than procrastination- but isn't that the case for all of us? None of us know how much time we have, so we need to make the most of what time we have.

The Doctor doesn't understand: he just wants her to live. He intends to wipe her memories of him so she will have a better chance of survival, but that misses the point: our memories are our life. And it is better to die young with strove of amazing memories than to die old after a life unlived. 

And this is the bit where we find out what the framing device with the diner was all about. The climax happens at the very end of history, where the Doctor and Clara meet, inevitably, Ashildr. It is she who points out that this is the prophecy referred to as the Hybrid. Pleasingly, it's left open whether or not the Doctor is actually half-human (shudder!) or whether the "Hybrid" refers to both the Doctor and Clara. 

We end with the Doctor in a retooled TARDIS, with a new Sonic Screwdriver, adventuring again. Meanwhile, Clara and Ashildr have their own retro Type 49, its exterior stuck as an American diner...

Oh, and it's just occurred to me: the diner in The Impossible Astronaut was Clara's TARDIS, parked a few feet away...

I can't even tell you how brilliant a piece of telly this is. I'm utterly floored by it.

Doctor Who: Heaven Sent

"I've finally run out of corridors..."

Wow. One one level this is a cross between Cube and Blink, but it's a fascinating thing to do with the penultimate episode. Structurally this is just treading water until the finale but the reality is much more interesting than that. This is Moffat, forever doing the big story arc stuff and the donkey work, getting to do a quirky and unusual episode on his fourth year as showrunner: his Midnight or Turn Left. It's also a tour de force of a performance from Capaldi. Whichever way you look at it, it's bloody good.

What elevates it to the sublime, though, is the twist at the end with the teleporter- although what happened to their being called "transmats" in Doctor Who? Proving my theory that, if you're teleported, you die and are replaced with a copy, untold different Doctors have repeated the same day for billions of years, burning themselves at the end of the day so another Doctor can repeat the cycle. It's a kind of Prometheus myth, and it's genius on all sorts of levels.

At the beginning I was wondering if we were looking at the return of the Vashta Nerada, but there is so much cool stuff here, from the Doctor's nightmare to the shifting rooms of the castle- reminded me of both Cube and Castrovalva- to the revelation that the Doctor left Gallifrey not because he was bored but because he was scared. Best of all is the respect shown to the late Clara: the Doctor spends eons mourning, literally, and her presence is everywhere. Her death matters.

At the end, though, we get a revelation: the infamous Hybrid isn't half-Dalek... it's the Doctor!  Is he half-human after all? What's going on? Whatever, we're in for a showdown under Gallifrey's burnt orange skies...