Enola Holmes 2 (2022)

 "You really are a nincompoop!"

It's been a while, but I've finally got round to seeing the sequel, in large part due to the pleasure of some truly exquisite company last night! And not only was it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, but I noticed in the credits that the writer was one Jack Thorne, whose distinguished career has included Adolescence among other things (must get round to that!) and who is, rather interestingly, rumoured as a possible new showrunner for Doctor Who... but we'll see.

The script is superb, working perfectly both as a murder mystery with twists and turns which all makes perfec sense at the end but also as a fun, watchable drama with a light touch, lots of fun and lots of wit. It's also, as last night's exquisite company remarked last night, based on the match girls' strike, a very real historical event, and the scandal with white phosphorus was a very real thing.

But Millie Bobby Brown yet again carries the whole thing with aplomb, a truly talented leading lady despite her youth, carrying the whole thing with wit, charisma and those delightfully quirky asides to the camera. To say that she carries the whole thing means a lot given the cast we have here- Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes and Helena Bonham Carter as their mother Eudoxia, in particular. I love the little Sherlockian moments, and it's clear from fairly early on that the film will end with Holmes meeting Watson.

In the end, then, a splendid film. A pedant may observe that the film is set in 1885, too late for Holmes meeting Watson and too early for the match girls' strike (Sarah Chapman is a historical figure), but I'm learning to be better with my pedantry. A hugely enjoyable film.

Years and Years: Episode 6

"This is the world we built."

Although we start the episode as one might expect- Vivienne Rook is PM, and she does a lot of Trumpy things like shutting down the BBC for being "enemies of the people" and denying Russian involvement in her election.And there's a lot of dystopian detail as per earlier episodes-
bacterial food that was never alive, working class estates being arbitrarily locked in, food banks closing- and Muriel's wonderful voice-of-the-author speech about how things have gone wrong since the millennium but how we're all to blame through wanting cheap stuff without considering the consequences. And there's a lot of horrifying stuff with Viktor and others in concentration cams which look very, very much like, well, you know.

But this is RTD. Things don't carry on through the same dystopian path. There is hope. Yes, it's undercut at the end by the point that the regime was opposed and falling anyway, but we see the Lyons family essentially toppling the government. And I now thing Edith is even cooler and Jessica Hynes deserves a BAFTA. But the point is that the very ordinary family we've been seeing turn out to be heroes- even Rosie and little Lincoln do heir bit against tyranny. Even Stephen goes some way to redeeming himself, much as though it looked for one horrifying moment that he was going to shoot Celeste.

Yet it's not just about the defiant note of hope, the insistence that yes, humans can be right bastards, but we have the potential to redeem ourselves. No; we have a fascinating final ten minutes of poetry as Edith, who I think represents someone the author would like to be, waits to die, and to have her memories and perhaps her consciousness (or just a copy?) uploaded online, perhaps to be immortal. There's a lot of philosophy about consciousness to unpick here, and I'd observe that, in all the futurology that RTD has given us, he's deliberately seemed to avoid the subject of the Singularity, of artificial intelligence becoming sentient. Is this the bit where he addresses such themes head on, being deliberately ambiguous? Is the "I am love" a statement on all this or just the endorphins of a dying woman? I don't know, but these six episode have been first rank telly.

Years and Years: Episode 5

"I’ll just topple the government. How about that?”

It’s 2028. Vivienne Rook is PM and initially little has changed- indeed, Rook’s public statements are just vacuous and meaningless platitudes. But the first thing we see is a critic being suddenly arrested on what looks like trumped up charges, mentioning the “disappeared”. Shades of Pinochet already.

Chez the Lyons there’s a struggle to recover from Daniel’s death, with Stephen visiting Viktor to tell him personally that he blames and will not forgive him. And it’s an even bleaker world- bananas are gone. Global heating means endless rain. Energy crises and co start blackouts mean much of what exists online is erased forever, and there’s an amusing scene of schoolchildren having to get used to this quaint little thing called paper. And then things get truly dystopian with dirty bombs causing radioactive fallouts in two major cities while floods erode the coast. There are floods of homeless refugees, both British and international. And this is less than a decade away.

There are positives; Muriel’s macular degeneration can be cured just like that, albeit at the cost of her family’s inheritance. But this is s world where civil liberties are despised, where “criminal” estates are walled off and where Rosie’s business is closed down because of where she lives. Each episode is getting more dystopian than the last, and scarily plausible in a world that contains such scum as Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins and Donald Trump. I think RTD underestimates the liberal backlash but, this being part polemic, creatively that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

There’s a human side too; an increasingly bitter Stephen lives with a woman he doesn’t particularly like. Edith is increasingly cool and easily my favourite character, but she’s dying. Bethany’s joy at becoming a bionic woman is wonderful- but, as Stephen points out, she has become state property. And Celeste is increasingly bitter at having to be nursemaid to her mother in law. These are very real people, anchoring us to this world.

The shocking conclusion, of course, has Stephen humiliate himself to get a better job with an absolute wanker he went to school with, and briefly meeting Vivienne Rook, who casually mentions that is she ever resigned as PM, “they’d kill me.” And the contract they’re bidding on is one for concentration camps for refugees and other desirables, where Rook plans to solve the overcrowding problems by “letting nature take its course”. Because this is inevitably where far right populism leads.

The human dimension adds extra horror, too, as Stephen deliberately moves Viktor to the extermination camp. And Bethany knows...

This is utterly sublime.