The Guest

Guest To Kill

The Guest 
BBC Four Episodes
September 2025

Warning: Mild spoilers.

The Guest is a four episode mini series put out by the BBC and, truth be told, it’s not the kind of show I would usually watch. However, my parents had it on in the background while I was doing something for half an hour and I made a note of it and came back to it a few days later to start it off from scratch on the BBC iPlayer. Because I found myself drawn to it, not so much by the story as I was by the acting of the two female leads, who were really giving some subtle and interesting nuances to their characters. 

These were Gabrielle Creevy as the down on her luck, poverty stricken Ria, who is not making enough money out of being a cleaner to keep herself and her boyfriend in food and, her new benefactor, the rich and powerful Fran, played by the great Eve Myles (who I best remember from Doctor Who spin off Torchwood).

Fran throws large amounts of cash in Ria’s direction and has her come to work in her… well it’s a bit of a mansion house with a neighbouring guest house. Her husband is away most of the time, seeing to his part of their company business overseas and, Fran takes to Ria and, cautiously, Ria also is somewhat seduced by Fran’s lifestyle. But there’s always a catch and as she starts to explore the fate of the previous cleaner, the contents of the ‘forbidden, locked room’ and starts paying attention to what business Fran’s public facing job is fronting (especially when she’s promoted to being her PA), things take on a sinister turn.

Not least of which is when Ria accidentally murders, in self defence, a suitor who at first seems to be just someone she met on a dating app but, it’s not too long when, despite her investigations and text messages from his phone after he’s very much deceased, she realises he also has a link to whatever’s going on at the house that Fran and her husband Simon built.

The story did not, I have to say, go where I wanted it to go… I was expecting more of a very classic horror element to creep into this by the third episode (I thought they were just being really clever about things, okay?) but it’s more than made up for in the chemistry between Fran and Ria. These are not two dimensional characters and they both carry hidden secrets. Creevy plays it very understated but less is definitely more and you can see her working things out behind her eyes as she progresses further down the rabbit hole. And as for Eve Myles performance as Fran… it’s probably the best I’ve seen her. You can see how her character has let herself become something of a monster over the years but there are also some heart rending scenes where you realise just how she’s gravitated to this and Miles take on the role is so pinpoint on the more, turn on a dime, slightly unstable parts of her personality that... well, like I said, best performance I’ve seen her do. Both actresses rely on the physicality of their expressions and the way they express and change their attitude from minute to minute... well, it’s just a pleasure to watch. 

And I think that’s me done with this one, actually. Like I said, The Guest is not my normal go to for TV entertainment but serendipity shone and I stumbled on a really interesting piece of work here. I think the story could have been a little more complex or, perhaps, a little more explored as there are some very short hand emotional beats on some of the supporting characters (perhaps another episode would have been beneficial) but, yeah, this one has some breathtaking acting performances and I will certainly try to put this one onto people’s radar, I think. 

Nightsleeper

Carry On Up
The Cyber

Nightsleeper
UK BBC September 2024
6 episodes

You know, I barely watch many British TV shows outside of, well, Doctor Who, these days because I’m not that enamoured of them. Heck, I don’t watch many TV shows period, truth be told. But there have been a couple over the last year and this one, Nightsleeper, is something I caught about a minute or two of when my parents were watching it. It looked pretty well put together and so I thought I’d try the first episode and, frankly, I was hooked right away. This is a truly high quality thriller from the BBC and I was so impressed with it. Even though, yeah okay, it’s not that original and it feels a little like half the plot of The Cassandra Crossing and The Taking Of Pelham 123 mixed in with Bird Of Prey (which is a TV show I’ve not seen since the 1970s or early 80s… wish they’d repeat that one again).

So, a cybercrimes worker called Abby, played startlingly believably by Alexandra Roach, in the Victoria Station area of London, is called back from her holiday (she was about to get underway) because a train has been hijacked… hack-jacked, in fact. The sleeper train going from, initially, Glasgow to Euston (the route is changed over many plot twists) is sabotaged with a computer device plugged into it’s workings and it’s on a direct collision course for London, unless an anonymous terrorist group are paid so many gazillions in bitcoin. With the cybercrime chief of staff away on holidays, Abby is the one trusted to try and stop this calamity. So it’s up to her and her, somewhat dodgy (who can she trust?) team and an ex-copper on the run (due to crimes he may or may not have committed) on the train, Joe, played by Joe Roan, to try and stop the train before it takes out the London terminus.

And it’s a great little cracker of a show, for sure. It’s fast paced and, you’d wonder how a cybercrime show about stopping a train could run for six 45 minute episodes but, it does go at a fair lick with a high number of twists and mini revelations which means, well, it never gets dull. I watched the whole show in two sittings and I could have easily watched another six right after.

Now, all this being said, in terms of writing… it’s a game of two halves. On the one hand the characterisation and dialogue is phenomenally well written… everyone seems fleshed out in their shorthand kind of way and you will be caring a lot about most of the characters. On the other hand… it does run every cliché and set up in the book but, even while you can predict what is going to happen a lot of the time (including the reveal of the identity of the main antagonist, so to speak, in the last episode), it doesn’t really matter because it’s all put together so beautifully (the editing is fantastic too) and it whizzes along in quite an addictive fashion.

So, yeah, you have the resigned top cybercrime guy brought in to help out (played here by David Threlfall), the opening bag snatcher chase used as a diversion to plant the device, the miscommunications and the rival unit who end up making the situation worse than it already is, the ex-rail guy who you just know is going to have a heart attack before the end of the show (played brilliantly by the always watchable James Cosmo), the top hierarchy making decisions about sacrificing the lives on the train and not telling their operatives (as in Abby and the majority of her team), the person inside the train who knows more than they’re letting on, the one working satellite phone (everything else blocked by phone jammers), the passenger who isn’t supposed to be on the train… all that stuff and more. But I didn’t mind it one bit because it was all done in such a way that all the clichés seemed like the best logical choices for the situation.

Also... some nice camera work and, as I said, the editing is all top notch. For instance, there’s a lovely moment when the camera zooms into the black and white CCTV screen which then turns into colour and becomes the next shot. And, yes, I know we’ve all seen that done before but it was done here with such throwaway panache that you can’t help but marvel at it. Another nice thing is the first episode opened with a shot of the piano at a station in Scotland being played by a passenger and the diegetic musical notes become the non-diegetic score of the scene.

So it’s six episodes of cat and mouse with an unknown antagonist and the few deaths in it are handled in such a way that the audience really feels them (there’s no body count element at work here) and a nice finale where Abby herself is in clear and present danger from the train which is hurtling towards her at increasing speeds. I can’t see a sequel to Nightsleeper being easy to market (although I’d absolutely love to see the continuing adventures of Abby, for sure) but as a stand alone mini-series this one was pretty great. A thorough recommendation from me.

Doctor Who - The Evil Of The Daleks

Victoria Spun

Doctor Who
The Evil Of The Daleks
UK Air date: 20 May - 1 July 1967
Seven Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Exterminating spoilers.

The Evil Of The Daleks was ‘the last in the present series’ of its particular season of Doctor Who back in 1967. After famous actress Pauline Collins turned down the BBCs offer to continue her character from the previous story as a new, regular Doctor Who companion, the script was rewritten to introduce a new addition to the TARDIS crew, Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield. She would join The Doctor (as played by Patrick Troughton) and Jamie (as played by Frazer Hines) after the death of her fictional father towards the end of the seventh and final episode. The next series would start off with the much loved Cyberman story, The Tomb Of The Cybermen.

And, well this is a first time watch for me but, unfortunately, due to the much hated policy of the BBC wiping all their master tapes to reuse sometime after broadcast, this serial suffers largely from the ‘missing presumed wiped’ status in that only the second episode, rediscovered on a copy tape at a car boot sale, has survived... which is a lot better off than most of the Doctor Who serials from before 1971, although I am still optimistic that versions of these will turn up in places like Australia or South Africa, pried from the clutches of the black market private collectors who I believe still have many of them, at some point in the future.

However, unlike the visuals, the BBC retained most (perhaps even all?) of the audio tracks to the stories so, this three disc set gives three viewing options. A third disc is extras (which I haven’t watched yet at time of writing and the second disc is the seven episodes with an animated cartoon in colour to accompany the original audio (goodness knows why anybody would want to see a black & white Doctor Who story in colour but I guess there are some strange people out there). The first disc in the set is the same 7 episodes in glorious monochrome with, if you desire, the option of watching the original surviving episode as part of that mix (for some reason relegated to the extras section). So, obviously, I watched the first black & white animated episode for this review, followed by the surviving episode, followed by the monochrome versions of 3-7. And I’m glad it shows up this way because, in comparison to the actual footage, it really shows up just how bad and limited the animations are, it has to be said.

I’ll declare that, as regular readers may remember, the Patrick Troughton version of The Doctor was my favourite incarnation of the character and this story, had I seen all the original live action versions of the episodes, may well have been one of my favourites. Alas, it has to be said, the combination of the original recordings with less well researched animation really takes all the enjoyment out of things.

The story is simple... the TARDIS is kidnapped from Gatwick Airport and The Doctor and Jamie track it down to an antique shop selling ‘brand new’ Victorian antiques. It turns out that the proprietor is using his own time machine to bring them to the present day (1967) for reasons not totally made clear but with the aim of bringing The Doctor and Jamie back in time to the Victorian era, for the Daleks to use for certain aspects of their plan to instil their race with the human factor (although that’s not the complete version of their plan). He does this because the Daleks have his daughter, Victoria and, of course, once The Doctor and Jamie arrive, the former pretends to work with the Daleks in order to defeat them while Jamie tries to rescue Victoria, unwittingly giving the Dalek’s the ‘human factor’ which is ultimately part of their plan.

And it’s probably nice stuff but it’s hard to tell by only having episode 2 to go on, as far as the visuals go. What I can say... and I know a lot of people like it, including my cousin in Australia... is that the animation is really not very good for a number of reasons. It’s a little flat and lifeless, to be honest. It’s like watching an old 1970s Filmation cartoon where you are on tenterhooks to find out if the animators are going to remember to make one of the characters blink every now and again (if you want to have a good shot at surviving the Weeping Angels then manifest yourself as a 1970s TV cartoon is my best advice). Yes, I know these are brand new state-of-the-art animations and there is obviously a fair amount of artistic expression going on but... well, even that is playing fast and loose with the brief in my opinion. Because, in addition to the lack of emotion on the actors faces which you can’t get just from sound itself (The Doctor comes across as particularly ruthless at some points during the middle section of the serial... you can’t see the worry which was presumably etched into his face in the live action version), the animated sections don’t even seem to be trying to match what originally might have been there.

Now that last statement could easily have been relegated to the ‘sheer conjecture’ department if it were not for the fact that we have the surviving middle episode as a comparison piece... with the top and tail of the cliffhanger in that episode seen as something which should surely be matched in the new animated footage. Alas, it’s clear when you see those moments in comparison that there have been huge liberties with what has been animated as opposed to whatever was originally seen. The angles are completely different and, in the animated version, show details like a person’s face which was clearly not visible on the real version. Also, little details like a Dalek’s arm pointing up instead of, in the original version of the scene, pointing down are also in evidence. 

Not to mention the fact that famous actors in roles, like Windsor Davis, look absolutely nothing like the actors in question... not to mention the bizarre way that the animated version of Victoria looks somehow permanently surprised. And was their really a coat of arms on the wall in the original labelled Whitaker, presumably in homage to the writer of this one being David Whitaker... or was it an in-joke added in only for this new version? And don’t get me started on why the scenes originally broadcast with The Beatles song Paperback Writer playing at the bar have been tracked in with a different song... good grief BBC, this is history, pay the money for the license!

So, as a facsimile stand-in for the original... which is what I would hope the brief here would be, I’m not interested in visual reinterpretation, just accuracy... then the cartoons here are absolute codswallop, it has to be said. And so I’ve not got too much more to add about this Blu Ray release, to be honest. For me, the newly animated cover version of The Evil Of The Daleks gets filed under the heading of ‘interesting’ rather than ‘good’ or ‘entertaining’ it’s sad to say. If you are a fan of Troughton’s Doctor then, obviously its a no-brainer to take a look at this but, yeah, don’t expect a faithful reconstruction of the original story because, as you’ll notice, it’s fairly clear the animators had absolutely no idea as to what was going on in some of the scenes and, yeah, they aren’t the best at improvising, it would seem.

Doctor Who - Empire Of Death

Sutekh And
The Banshees

Doctor Who -
Empire Of Death
Airdate: 22nd June 2024
BBC 1

Warning: More spoilers.

Well that was... okay. Better than the set up episode and not a real clunker like a fair few in this season of Doctor Who have been. Empire of Death is the second of a two part season finale, carrying directly on from last week’s The Legend Of Ruby Sunday (reviewed here). It has a lot to do but the exposition is fairly light handed and it does have time to go off and explore other story ideas as it sets about mostly resolving questions and threads brought up in the current series. There’s also a big problem right from the outset here but I’ll get into it that in a moment.

Okay, so this episode sees The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) and former Sixth/Seventh Doctor companion Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford) on the run from Sutekh and his gift of death. They are on their own in the universe now because almost everything is now dead worlds and dead suns (Earth and all life on it is destroyed very early on in the episode... and therein lies the problem) but they find someone who has a bit of metal they need to get their ‘get out of jail free’ gadget back, so they can regain the upper hand and set to putting things right.

Which they do... and then we finally find out who Ruby’s mum is... who turns out to be nobody of any importance (which, in Marvel comics terms, would be the equivalent of what Steve Dikto wanted to do with the reveal on the Green Goblin, as opposed to what Stan Lee actually did, causing the rift between them). Which is a bit of a let down in some ways but, I like the idea that this simple matter of identity, which is the only reason Sutekh has allowed these three fugitives from death to live, has become important because of the way certain life forms value things and people... and so that’s what they become. Which is a nice idea and, yeah, almost certainly true.

So most of the mysteries are tied up and The Doctor and Ruby Sunday part company (although I suspect she may be back to guest star in the odd UNIT episode or two at some part in the next series). If Disney don’t decide to just write off the already completed next series as a tax loss, that is. However we still have the mystery of next door neighbour Mrs. Flood and the way Anita Dobson is scripted and plays the character makes me think that I was on the right track thinking she’s an important villain from some point in the Doctor Who universe... especially when she breaks the fourth wall again at the end of the episode to tell the audience that The Doctor’s story ends in terror.

And I thought the episode played pretty well and the memory TARDIS from the, not so good I’d have to say, Tales From The TARDIS streaming show is given a practical use, of sorts, in this episode (although everybody kind of recognised the background of a memory TARDIS through the open doors in a shot in the early trailers for the series so... no real surprise there).

The big problem for me with the episode was that, most of the regular characters, UNIT or otherwise, die near the start of the episode (as does all life on Earth) so, you kind of know there’s going to be a huge ‘reset button’ of a resolution to the story, to get everybody back to life again, at some point. So The Doctor trapping Sutekh in the time vortex to bring death to death (which, by the way, would mean everybody in the universe should now be immortal... so that would be a huge problem in itself) seems a bit of a cop out ending, to be honest. Still, it got the story back to where it needed to be and although this new incarnation of The Doctor kept crying again (as he has in every bloody episode this season, I think)... it was an okay end of season finale and I totally didn’t mind it.

Not much more to say about Empire Of Death. Murray Gold’s score was great, it was nice seeing Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen in footage from The Pyramids Of Mars on the viewer as part of the story and I’m still looking forward to seeing this year’s Christmas special, I’m pleased to say. Unfortunately, I’m not expecting the producers to learn anything much from the reception of the show in the next season because, well, they’ve already shot it before the first series aired, I believe.

Here’s my ranking of the episodes in this year’s series, from worst to best, if anybody wants to know (because that’s what people seem to be doing these days, it seems... personal rankings) now that I’ve had time to reevaluate them (click on the titles for the corresponding review)...

8. Rogue
7. Space Babies
6. The Devil’s Chord
5. The Legend Of Ruby Sunday
4. Empire Of Death
3. Boom
2. 73 Yards
1. Dot And Bubble

Doctor Who - Dot And Bubble

TwitFace

Doctor Who -
Dot And Bubble
Airdate: 1st June 2024
BBC 1

Warning: Minor spoilers within.

Wow. A three in a row run of good episodes. Dot And Bubble is another above average episode of Doctor Who and my biggest question after seeing this current hat trick of pretty great shows is... what the heck were the BBC/Disney thinking by opening this season with two of the worst episodes possible? Why start off with the obvious duds?

So this one is about a society of rich kids who inhabit a planet where the one town, Finetime, is where they live and talk to each other on social media all day, including the ‘two long hours’ a day where they have to ‘work’. Their rich families pay for them to be there and many of them are incapable of even being able to walk around without the great holographic bubble of social media generated around their head, projected by the dot (aka, a flying drone) which generates the bubble. Which is a problem if, like the main and totally unsympathetic protagonist Lindy Pepper-Bean (played by Callie Cooke), all your friends are being eaten, alphabetically, by huge ‘digesting monsters’ and the only help you have are these two strangers who have infiltrated the social network, called The Doctor (played by Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (played by Millie Gibson).

Yeah, it’s tough trying to navigate streets by yourself with no arrows and instructions to show you how to move your feet. You will bump into lamp posts or you could, like many of Lindy’s friends, walk right into the giant stomach opening of various monsters walking... well, crawling... in the streets.

Now, this is proper science fiction, with a heavy dose of satire against both the generation of youth who spend all their time on various variants of social media (yeah, I’m probably guilty of that to an extent too... follow me on Twitter!) plus, basically, the dumb rich kids who are born into a privileged position in society. We’ve all met them... what’s in their wallet on any given day is way higher than their IQ. And I’ve got to hand it to Russell T. Davies, this episode was worthy and, quite in the style of, the late, great Philip K. Dick. In many ways.

And through it all, even though the episode is a pretty self contained story (and an excellent stab at ‘real’ sci-fi, for sure), they still manage to add another notch on the most blatant, so far, part of the underlying arc of the season. Namely, yep... another Susan Twist sighting. This time she’s playing the (dead but she doesn’t know it yet) mother of Lindy... but here’s the thing. Both The Doctor and Ruby react to her presence in this. The Doctor flags her as being the face and voice of the ambulances from the episode Boom (reviewed by me here) and Ruby also remembers her from somewhere else. And the hint there is, she maybe remembers her from last week’s alternate timeline and so, just like the timeline reset changed with Ruby having been to Wales three times instead of two, as originally stated at the opening of 73 Yards (reviewed here), it implies that we’re not completely done with the events of that last story yet. I hope that means we’re finally going to get some closure on just what the old lady version of Ruby was saying to terrify all those people... it’s a bit of an important and glaring omission (just as the previous David Tennant incarnation of the character not regenerating into Jodie Whittaker’s old costume hasn’t been credibly explained in the ‘in universe’ world... and it needs to be).

And, yeah, it was pretty great. The vapid and clueless losers who made up the entire (under 27) society of Finetime might just as well have had ‘conservative party’ stamped onto their foreheads. I think the current season of Doctor Who is certainly getting back on track and I think Dot And Bubble adds to the season considerably. That being said, next week’s so-called ‘Bridgerton’ episode is worrying me a bit. It’s the kind of programme I would naturally steer clear of so I hope the episode has something other than parody going for it. I guess I’ll find out in due time.

Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology

Meep Throat

Doctor Who -
The Fourth Doctor Anthology
Panini Comics
ISBN: 9781804911587

This is a somewhat timely reprint of all the Tom Baker likeness comic strips that appeared in the original Doctor Who Weekly and subsequent Doctor Who Monthly comics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before he changed to Peter Davidson in the strip. And when I say timely I mean, strategically marketed to come out and grab the cash at the best possible time, when readers like me will be wanting to reacquaint themselves with one Pat Mills story in particular, The Star Beast. Because, at time of writing, a modern TV adaptation of that particular strip, which ran over a few weeks, will be screening in just a few days as episode one of the new 14th Doctor 60 year anniversary specials.

I used to love the comic and I still, if moths haven’t got to them, have the first 70 or so issues up in the loft somewhere. I remember reading these issues the first time around and being completely hooked on them from the opening story (in particular). Revisiting them now, it’s certainly easy to see why. They had the absolute cream of the crop of British creative talent working on these and most, if not all, of the writers were doing the same job on Britain’s greatest comic (and in their words, the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic) 2000AD... which I also have the first thousand or so issues of, stashed away in boxes. So these stories are brought to you by giants like writers Pat Mills (the creator of 2000AD), John Wagner (co-creator of Judge Dredd) and Steve Parkhouse... not to mention artists such as Dave Gibbons and, for one brief but memorably stylised story featuring an old style Cyberman straight out of the William Hartnell story The Tenth Planet, Mike McMahon (who drew the greatest Judge Dredd strips ever... although, arguably, the same could be said of Brian Bolland).

And yeah, you can tell it’s all these 2000AD people writing this for what was, then, the British arm of Marvel, because the stories are absolutely packed chock full of action but also two very tell tale things... they are full of ideas worked into the world building and, they are equally full of dark humour coupled with brilliantly terrible puns (both visual and verbal). Not to mention, they wear their influences very much on their sleeves sometimes in terms of riffing (or let’s face it, stealing) from famous pop culture franchises.

For instance, the story Dragon’s Claw deals with the warriors of the Shaolin Temple and the myth of the 18 Bronze Men (who featured in a fair few kung fu movies) is woven into the plot. Although, in this version, the 18 Bronze Men turn out to be Sontaran warriors. Similarly, an excellent story called City Of The Damned, where a planet is ruled by leaders who have wiped out all emotional reaction from the population, must surely have taken it’s inspiration from George Lucas’ early film THX1138.

There are even a few things which directly tie it up to 2000AD stories a few times, such as the mention of a ‘Shuggy Hall’ in the story Dogs Of Doom... Shuggy was a kind of ‘crazy snooker/pool’ game played in Mega City One from the world of Judge Dredd. And in my favourite of these stories, which opens this collection, The Iron Legion (which deals with a mechanical robot army based on the Roman Empire invading parts of the galaxy, controlled by an evil race of alien entities), there’s an old broken down Robot called Vesuvias and, honestly, he’s not a far cry from Walter The Wobot, Judge Dredd’s robot butler in the early days of 2000AD.

The stories presented here range from longer, multi part stories to one off, self contained tales but, the majority of them are hits rather than misses even now, I would say. As for The Star Beast, with Beep The Meep and the alien Wraiths hunting him... well, I remembered it well so I must have liked it back in the day but, it just seems to me now like the twist in the character (which I saw coming even in my early teens) is very obvious and, that story doesn’t have too much else going for it, to be honest. Also, I’m really not sure how the story can be fleshed out to take up more than around 15 minutes of screen time so I’m guessing the TV version of The Star Beast will be padded with a lot of the falling out from the surprise regeneration at the end of the last show, The Power Of The Doctor (reviewed here) and a shaky, possibly temporary resolution (of sorts) to the Doctor/Donna problem.

That being said, anything written by Pat Mills is always going to be worth a look so I remain hopeful and, regarding Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology, I remain grateful that these wonderful strips have gotten a beautiful reprint at the best possible time. I loved revisiting these stories and they’re definitely worth tracking down if you’ve never read them before.

Doctor Who - Planet Of The Daleks

Me And My Thal

Doctor Who
Planet Of The Daleks
Airdate: 7th April - 12th May 1973
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Six Episodes

So this isn’t a bad story in the Series Ten Doctor Who Blu Ray boxed edition. Following on from the last episode of Frontier In Space (reviewed here), Jo Grant (played by Katy Manning) has dragged The Doctor (played by Jon Pertwee) back into the TARDIS as he had been shot by The Master (in Roger Delgado’s swan song in that role). After instructing the Timelords to pilot the TARDIS to ‘follow the Daleks’, who were at the periphery of the last dastardly plot, he slips into a coma and the TARDIS lands on the planet Spiridon. Jo goes out to find help and gets embroiled with a group of Thals who have come on a suicide mission from Skaro (planet of the Thals and Dals... as they once were, although the Dals were later revised to being Kaleds) to try and find the new Dalek base on Spiridon and... well, do something to stop them. Meanwhile the TARDIS is covered in fungus but The Doctor recovers (due presumably to his Timelord biology) and, when he goes looking for Jo, he also gets embroiled with another part of the same group of Thals.

Jo, who is near death due to being sprayed with fungus, is rescued by one of the natives of Spiridon called... um... a Spiridon... and nursed back to health. The Spiridons are completely invisible, by the way, except when they are wearing their trademark, huge purple fur coat thingies. The Spiridon who rescues Jo is, naturally, the only Spiridon on the planet who is not helping the Daleks, who are keeping a huge army in cold storage, ready to unleash on that part of the galaxy. It’s soon up to Jo and The Doctor (who has been a legendary and mythical figure in Thal history, since the impression he made on them in the very first 1963 Dalek story) to infiltrate and stop the Dalek’s master plan... which also involves releasing a bacteria onto the planet to kill all life there before unleashing their army.

And, although it feels like it’s been padded just like an old 1930s - 1950s theatrical serial, the story is entertaining enough and, while not as good as the previous one, certainly doesn’t get boring at all.

One of the nice things which seems to be endemic in the DNA of the writing of the show at this time is that the story never feels hampered by the special effects. Occasionally those effects are very good but, for quite a lot of the time, they do also look characteristically cheap and awful, it has to be said. But, the writers never really let that get in the way. There seems to be a real ‘make do and mend’ attitude to the way in which the stories are crafted to the final visual production and, it never fails to amaze me how many things the special effects team try and tackle, knowing that it won’t look too great a lot of the time. For instance, there’s one scene where The Doctor and some Thals are trapped by the Daleks in a room with a big ventilation shaft leading to the surface. The Doctor organises a big bit of cloth and they heat up the air under it and the whole lot of them hold onto the corners and float up to the surface of the planet through the vent. To say this looks convincing would be less than the truth but, you know, it’s a fun solution and they did their best with the materials and budgets they had, for sure.

There are a couple of silly plot points that bother me though. For instance, the ‘weird science’ of the planet is such that water doesn’t freeze and turn into ice but, when it gets well below zero, instead turns into molten ice water. So, of course the way The Doctor and the Thals kill a couple of Daleks is to drag them into one of these natural, extreme cold molten ice pools. The Daleks die instantly because, we are told, they are extremely susceptible to cold.  However, The Doctor’s big plan is to flood the sleeping Dalek army with the icy water flow to kill them all. Ahem... this is the same Dalek army which have been frozen and placed into suspended animation to wake up later. So... they didn’t automatically die like the others when they were chilled out then? Kinda makes no sense, does it? Also, I’m pretty sure the miniatures used for the sequences where the army starts to thaw out before being flooded with thick, icy water are repainted versions of those old, little Dalek rollykins you used to be able to buy in the shops, mounted on magnets... or possibly even the old Marx branded miniature Daleks. Either way, they look noticeably different from their full size counterparts.

The other thing that bothers me is the part of the Dalek plan to kill everything on the surface. Honestly, the Spiridons are already a slave labour force for them and the only other people on the planet are a few Thals. Why in heck would you need to destroy all life there? This really doesn’t make much sense for a race who are supposed to be amongst the most intelligent, albeit evil and diabolically deadly, species in the galaxy. Mind you, constantly repeating phrases like “You will be exterminated!” and “We are defeated.” at the top of their Stephen Hawking-like voices doesn’t sound much like a highly evolved race of creatures to me either, truth be told.

Once again, the insides of a Dalek are scooped out so a human can fit in and masquerade as one. This is something which was not new to the show, in fact William Hartnell and Peter Cushing’s versions of The Doctor were encouraging that right from the very first Dalek story and its big screen adaptation but... bearing in mind the amount of blue prints and diagrams which have been published over the decades showing you just what is inside a Dalek (in the fictional Whoniverse), I still am amazed that there is any room left to fit a person inside it. With all that inner machinery there really is only room for the very small Kaled creature inside it, it seems to me.

Anyway, Planet Of The Daleks is not a great story but, even as perhaps the least interesting story of 1973, it’s still pretty entertaining and never really gets dull, as some of the modern variations of the show sometimes do. The next story in the box is the classic story The Green Death, which was the final story in the main show of Jo Grant and which I reviewed in its DVD incarnation here. The whole series has six discs loaded with extras and, on the last disc, the full two part story The Death Of The Doctor from the spin off show The Sarah Jane Adventures is included, which would, decades later, return Katy Manning back to the role of Jo Grant, for which she was best known. That story also includes Matt Smith as The Doctor and, of course, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. If you are a lover of Pertwee’s much loved stab at The Doctor, then I would, in conclusion, highly recommend this Series 10 box set.

Ghost Watch

 

Ceci N’est
Pas Une Pipes

Ghost Watch
BBC 1992
Directed by Lesley Manning
BBC/101 FIlms DVD Region 2

In 1938, Orson Welles scared gazillions of listeners with his fake documentary style radio broadcast adaptation of War Of The Worlds, presented as newsflash interruptions to scheduled transmissions and panicking half of America. By 1992 you would have thought that nobody could fall for such a stunt again and, to be fair to the BBC, when they broadcast Ghostwatch for the only time it’s ever been allowed on terrestrial TV, on Halloween of that year, it was billed as being a drama and the intro to the programme presented it as the same. However, for people like me and many others in the UK, some of whom were tuning into it a little way in after a movie on another channel had finished, Ghostwatch was what the narrative presented itself to be... a live broadcast transmission of a novelty Halloween programme, a vigil where the BBC were watching over a haunted house where two young girls and a mother were being terrorised by an angry spirit.

And why shouldn’t we trust what we were seeing with our own eyes... the whole show is done exactly as a live BBC event would be and it was fronted by some very reliable TV presenters. Indeed, it was headed up by one of the most assured and authoritative, no nonsense TV show presenters ever, Michael Parkinson (who’s interview talk show Parkinson was a staple of British TV for a very long time) and he was accompanied by famous TV show presenters Mike Smith (in the studio taking phone calls), Smith’s wife and fellow presenter Sarah Greene (actually going into the house to spend time there for the night via one of a fair few live links) and even a young Craig Charles (then better known as a presenter of sorts, before he found fame as the star of Red Dwarf) as the ‘man on the street’, wrangling the crowds of onlookers, well wishers and amateur specialists in all things most haunted... as one of the many diversions which the writers used to make this absolutely feel like a typical, BBC live show.  Complete with phone ins, interviews with guests (played by actors and also non-professionals) and the usual arguments about “Is it real?”, “Is it just the girls faking things?” and, importantly to hold the tension and build up to the point where things, inevitably, start to go wrong... “Is anything going to happen tonight while we’ve got the cameras in there or is it all just a load of nonsense?”

For the most part, they did really well at maintaining the illusion that, not only spooky things were beginning to happen in the house but also quite openly hostile, threatening and downright unpleasant things which, as the show builds to its inevitable climax, leaves no viewer safe. Parkinson is aided in the studio, in the chair next to him, by parapsychologist Dr Lin Pascoe (played by Gillian Bevan), to argue against the cynics and, in the house with Sarah Greene and her film crew, we have the mother, played by Brid Brennan, along with her two fictional daughters played by Michelle and Cherise Wesson.

It’s nicely done. Looking back on it now you can see that the presenters were much better at this than a couple of the actors and they really carry the feeling that you are watching a live event. The various viewers flooding the phone boards to tell their stories for the show (and there was a real live line running too while the show aired, although not an interactive one as was being depicted on screen) gives it a very naturalistic feel as viewers see figures in recorded footage and then the hosts cue up the videos again to see what it is the viewers are telling them they can see. It all leads up to a climax where things get very bad, leading on to stories from viewers who are starting to experience poltergeist style breakages and trance like states in their children as they are watching the show.

Then, after a clever piece of chicanery where the cameras catch one of the girls faking it and starting more arguments about the ‘reality’ of ghosts on the show, it turns out she was just faking it for the viewers in case nothing happened that night... and then the real fireworks begin as one of the girls gets trapped in the cupboard under the stairs where the poltergeist, child molester Mr. Pipes (named by the girls after the sounds of the heating system making noises, which the early apparitions were originally confused with) originally killed himself and was eaten by a load of his own cats. Then, shortly after that, the sound man is knocked unconscious (or possibly killed, we never find out) and the lights die in the house. We are soon presented with a recovered live feed (do not adjust your sets folks... a slight technical hitch) and it’s Sarah Greene and the girls playing a board game in the downstairs and all appears well again... until Dr. Pascoe realises that the live feed is just repeat playing footage from earlier in the night and that the ‘ghost’ has got ‘in the machine’ as it were... the TV cameras acting as a huge, 'national seance' and letting the ghost into the houses of all the viewers. The lights in the studio die, ghost winds whip through the set and by the end of the show, it’s just glimpses of the still stalwart Michael Parkinson trying to figure out, with no crew there, if any of the cameras are still broadcasting, before he himself is visited by the spirit of Mr. Pipes. It all gets a bit like Nigel Kneale’s chaotic conclusion to Quatermass And The Pit, truth be told and the events themselves are obviously based on the real life events of the Enfield Poltergeist (which was even the basis for one of the sequels to The Conjuring).

And, yeah, by this point you’d think people would have realised that this was a bit over the top and a dramatisation... and many did. I mean, there are laughable things in this show. The cats on the soundtrack seem a little too clear and well done and, well, I don’t know whose idea it was to have the characters continually referring to the under the stairs cupboard as ‘the gloryhole’ but it certainly brought a smile to my face. It’s an old term which has been in use for centuries but, possibly, the more frequent sexual usage of the term wasn’t foremost in the minds of some viewers (and whoever passed the scripts at the BBC) so, I think someone was getting away with something there. Back in 1992 I would have been none the wiser, I suspect.

However, clearly people did believe what they were seeing. The show prompted huge amounts of complaints, the possible cause of a suicide of a teenager a few days later and it is apparently the first TV programme cited in the British Medical Journal as causing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children. Consequently, the BBC have never themselves aired the show again but, if you lurk in the company of various horror fans and creators on the internet, people are still talking about this 'one off' broadcast and how influential it was to this day. I suspect many of those modern day ‘ghost hunting’ reality TV shows would not be around today had this not inadvertently paved the way for them to exist and thrive in a TV format.

All said and done, you can laugh (comfortably, from this century) at the last ten minutes of the show being a little too over the top and ‘going for it’ way too enthusiastically to be really effective but, television and its reception by viewers was a different thing back then, even as late as the early 1990s and... if you sat through the thing from fairly early on in the broadcast, the brilliant slow burn makes it almost impossible to not take it seriously. And if you’re not looking out for writer’s tricks to try to fool the audience because you a) believe it’s real and b) don’t think much will happen except for maybe a few noises on the microphones... then it’s only natural that viewers would let this thing get to them. And get to them it did.

So there you have it. Ghostwatch is a show that is still thought of with a certain amount of affection by fans of ghostly tales and if you are in that camp then you probably should take a look at this one to try and get some idea of what all the fuss was about. And, despite our cynical, jaded view of such things now, I think there’s a good reason why the BBC have never aired it again on their own stations, effectively banning it for quite a while on the airwaves... I think there are still quite a few people who, if they tuned into this by accident nowadays, would still be forgiven for thinking something sinister and unholy was reaching out from their television set to come and get them. The DVD is completely free of any extras (aside from that old chestnut, a menu) and my only criticism is that it really needs to get a Blu Ray release, fully loaded with some decent bonus features... it’s fitting that a dark TV phenomenon such as this one should get such a thing.

Doctor Who - The Sontaran Experiment

Styre Beware

Doctor Who
The Sontaran Experiment
Airdate: 22nd February - 1 March 1975
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Two Episodes

So following on directly from The Ark In Space (which I reviewed here), we have The Sontaran Experiment. This was Kevin Lindsay’s second go at playing a member of the Sontaran race following their debut in the previous season opposite Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in The Time Warrior. It was also his last... as the costume apparently aggravated his heart condition, causing his death some months later. However, before he died he really established a performance and manner of speaking as a Sontaran which various actors continue on to this day.

This one is, it has to be said, a mostly deadly dull affair so, thank goodness it only lasts for two episodes. In fact, it’s one of only a handful of classic stories which last that short running time in the first quarter of a century of the show. It’s also one of the few which doesn’t feature the TARDIS in any shape or form since The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his companions are arriving at the future version of Earth (in the year 16087AD) via the matter transmitter on Nerva, so they can make some adjustments to get the crew safely recolonising the planet again.

Alas, a small team of people for a another colony are also roaming the planet trying to survive a lone Sontaran and his highly dodgy looking robot who is running an experiment on the ‘humans’ that he’s lured there, in order to see how they stand up to torture and pave the way for an invasion fleet. Nobody asks why the Sontarans want to invade an empty planet so... I shan’t either. There’s obviously an entirely good explanation of this that the show’s writers and producers decided not to share with the audience.

Sarah Jane was, of course, also involved in the previous Sontaran story so she is shocked at first because... well they all look alike to her and she thought that Linx had somehow managed to survive. Harry of course, played as always by Ian Marter (who also wrote the Target novelisation), has never heard of them which is unfortunate because, the three main protagonists actually spend most of the two episodes apart form each other and all doing different ‘side missions’, so to speak, to do their bit in defeating this lone Sontaran and eventually signalling to his superior officer in space, also played by Kevin Lindsay (it’s not like they’d made more than one Sontaran costume for this production anyway), that the Earth was not to be trifled with.

And it’s pretty boring, mostly. The dialogue doesn’t sparkle and, apart from some charming performances, especially from the well spoken Lindsay, there’s not a heck of a lot to recommend on this one. Also, despite being a family show, the amount of times torture comes up just makes it feel a bit unpleasant with definite shades of Nazi Germany being alluded to in terms of the experimentation of the title, despite the fact that it isn’t really that violent.

Tom Baker apparently broke his collar bone while making this one and, looking at the forest landscape filled with big dips in it (and I suspect it might also have been shot in a quarry too), it’s really not that surprising that somebody broke something. Out of all of the stories in this series, this one just feels like its padding, to be very honest, to help link up the overall arc of that season and bide time until the next, six part and much quoted story Genesis Of The Daleks.

The pacing isn’t great either. Yes, everyone’s got something to do but it all feels a bit lethargic and I did notice at least one or two scenes which kind of didn’t quite make sense and were almost non-sequiturs presented in the order that they were televised. I learned today that at least one scene was cut out after Tom Baker broke his collar bone so I have to wonder if that’s what caused some of the lines and character locations in this to be... I dunno.... slightly out of kilter with what comes before or after them.

Whatever the reason, this was certainly the last two parter in the show until Peter Davidson’s incarnation of The Doctor starred in Black Orchid seven years later. This makes it about as long as one episode of the modern version of the show but, even some of the clunkier episodes these days make this one look bad. Perhaps some of that is precisely because the actors playing The Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry all such have good chemistry together. Put them all on their own and they can’t bounce off each other the way they did in the previous stories. It really shows here and even Dudley Simpson’s musical score can’t liven this one up. So... sorry for the short review but this really isn’t a story I would recommend unless you are making a point of watching this entire series as one, fairly loose story arc. Certainly the least interesting story of this season.

Killing Eve Series 3

Eve It To Griever

Killing Eve Series 3
UK/USA BBC
Eight Episodes 13th April to 1 June 2020

Warning: Spoilers on this one.

It’s funny... I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the third series of Killing Eve. People seem to think it’s lost it’s edge or is deathly dull and even my mother, who avidly watched the first couple of series with my father and I, stopped joining us after episode two of this third season. I can kinda understand the drop off in attention in some ways... this series possibly doesn’t match people’s expectations of what this one might have been in terms of the somewhat hollow but still quite strong statement of Villanelle being rejected by Eve and shooting her in the back as an end of season cliffhanger last year.

That the title character would survive was never in doubt but while the simple resolution to this where Eve (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) meet on a London bus as Eve passionately kisses and then head butts her it’s, alas, not par for the course for this particular series in terms of dramatic resolutions. Truth be told, that’s about the only time Eve and Villanelle share screen time together until the last episode... which is kind of a shame because, while both the first two series kept the sexual/killer tension between the two strong by keeping them apart for most of the running time, it’s almost like the writers couldn’t think of anything else to do except keep them apart even more this year and... rather than bringing the ‘distance relationship’ to life, it just kind of drains the show of any real punches this time around.

Not that it hasn’t got a lot going for it... I just think people were expecting something different to what they got.

This one starts off with an episode which, on the aftermath of Eve surviving her wounds, Kenny (Sean Delaney), who worked for his mother and Eve’s boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) in the last show and who has quit the bureau to take a job at as a trainee journalist at a magazine, befriends Eve and is her only contact with her old espionage life... which she does not want back. However, when Kenny takes a fatal dive off a roof at the end of the first episode, all the players come back as Eve and Carolyn try to find the killer who they assume is a member of the mysterious but deadly ‘Twelve’, who Villanelle works for. That being said, Carolyn is still under my suspicions as being the ultimate leader of The Twelve so we’ll see how that goes in the next series, I suspect.

Meanwhile, Villanelle has a new and deadly set of bosses but wants to quit her assasin’s life and do something else, preferably with Eve but neither of them are that sure of each other, obviously. Hence the brutal head butt on their first, brief meeting. And, it’s all a bit familiar but with less at stake, it seems to me. Eve has to reconcile with the fact that her husband just doesn’t want her around anymore, after the way events played out for him last series and, though he gets a pitchfork through his throat for his trouble (he survives, it seems)... as a last ditch attempt by Villanelle’s employers as a frame up job to make it look like Villanelle has killed him, in order to drive a wedge between them... the whole thing seems a little less dramatic as, I suspect, most of the audience has probably written off Eve’s husband as a source of interest at this point anyway.

That being said... the whole cast are stunning. Especially Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw and Kim Bodnia (as Villanelle’s former director Konstantin, who’s having his own troubles this series). There’s even a staggeringly interesting ‘Eveless’ episode where Villanelle finds her lost mother and then, as one might expect, kills her. To be honest though, the whole series does feel a bit like padding. The producers were already making series four, I think, at the same time as this one so the whole thing feels like much more of a fine tuning of the main players in the cast (and the setting up of a ‘big boss’ danger character for Villanelle to have to contend with in the next series) so that a dramatic resolution to the show may, if they don’t go for series five, be a possibility. It’s not dull, in other words but, at the same time, it’s not packing the punch of the previous two. Also, the end of the very last shot this year is something which is really easy to see coming. I new exactly where the credits would start rolling as the sequence started and, frankly, that’s not much of a cliff hanger either, in all honesty.

So there you go... a short review for a short series. Back in the 1970s the first three series combined would have made up the episode count for just one series so I don’t when or why having such short numbers of episodes became the norm here. Doctor Who and Sherlock are guilty of such minimalism too. Who the heck is controlling these budgets? However, Killing Eve is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the jewels in the BBC crown and although this third series may be a little sluggish in terms of character resolution or the thrills and spills of previous seasons, I think it’s still an absolutely necessary watch for fans of Killing Eve and, hopefully, the writing will pay dividends in the fourth season when, presumably, things that have been planted this year come to fruition. So, you know, maybe give it a go.

DEVS

Ultra Violet

DEVS
2020 UK/USA
BBC/BBC iPlayer, FX

Warning: Very minor spoilers about the plot set up from episode one.

So if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while now you’ll know that I’ve never been that keen on Alex Garland's work but, here I am in the middle of Covid 19 lockdown and the trailer I saw for this eight episode miniseries called DEVS looked pretty intriguing so I figured I’d at least give the first episode a go. Well good for him, he actually managed to keep me watching the whole eight episodes and I kinda enjoyed thinking my way through what is, on the surface at least, the illusion of a fairly dense text. As it is, you will figure out almost everything fairly quickly and the simplicity of the idea is something that every young toddler thinks of at some point in their early life, I suspect, but the presentation of this, while it has its ‘ever so slight’ faults, chalks this up as being much better than his previous (although equally obvious) credited movie works either as writer or director... namely Ex Machina (which I reviewed here) and Annihilation (which I reviewed here).

The plot, as much as I can reveal without totally spoiling that central premise you are working your way towards in the first episode (it’s pretty much spelled out very clearly after that) involves a central protagonist called Lily, played by my favourite dancing robot lady from Ex Machina (and she was also in Annihilation), actress Sonoya Mizuno. The story starts off as a mystery when, at the end of the first episode, Lily’s boyfriend Sergei (played by Karl Glusman from Love, reviewed here), who has just been promoted to the DEVS section at their dream job IT company workplace known as AMAYA, is killed by the chief of security for an act of industrial espionage. This is presented to the world as a suicide but Lily, obviously, knows better and so she finds her computer genius ex-boyfriend (played by Jin Ha) to investigate further. This brings down the wrath of the security head plus an almost but not quite convoluted espionage story into the mix when, really, the story details don’t matter because it’s just a mystery to lure you into thinking about the real thing... what happens at DEVS.

And that’s where it falls down a little because, nice as the presentation of the central problem is... and it is really nice to look at with an extraordinary soundtrack comprised of some needle drops plus original score by regular musical collaborators Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury... you’ve already kind of figured out what you need to know by the end of the first episode and, if you haven’t guessed it already by then, you’ll certainly have it in the bag by the last episode. This is unfortunate because, yeah, you will be able to predict where the ending is going to take you and, despite talks of the nature of the work being ‘monitored’ at DEVS, it does seem to be a somewhat less than satisfactory conclusion to the whole thing. A kind of hollow victory for Lily, the boss of DEVS (Forest, outstandingly played by Nick Offerman) and his girlfriend (played by Alison Pill) which is only, to be honest, held together by the truly wonderful performances of these three.

Okay, my main problem with DEVS is also a problem with my overall perception of it because, I’m going to say it out straight and say that it does feel kind of padded in places and this storyline could have been much punchier and dramatic as a movie, rather than stretched out over eight long episodes. However, the contradiction for me is in the fact that, if it had been presented as a much shorter movie, the obviousness of the central premise and ending would have been a real turn off for me and I would probably have slated it. As it happens though, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would and that’s because of all the visual distraction overlaying that starting point, I think.

That being said, the very slight ‘twist’ on a cosmetic level of the title of the show and the name of the work section, DEVS, is not something I saw coming. I’m not really that impressed with it but it is quite clever... I just wish it meant more than what it does in the grand scheme of things in the show. I’m trying to keep this as spoiler free as I can so I won’t reveal it here but, if you’re wondering why my review title isn’t the standard pun yet has nothing to do with the content of the series, that’s because it’s a decoder key for the title of the show. Crack that and you will crack what is, honestly, a very minor spoiler.

There is one thing I would really complain about, though... and that’s the use of needle drop music at the start of one of the episodes. The piece is Steve Reich’s Come Out from 1966 and it’s a nice piece where the recorded phrase ‘come out to show them’ (I won’t get into the political implications of the recording here) is synched against a copy of it and each looped on two tape recorders at very slightly different speeds. As just over twelve minutes elapse, the two go more and more gradually out of phase and the way the human brain perceives them, often as a wooshing sound like a train on tracks, is constantly shifting as the fluid relationship between the two copies of the same recording continues. So basically it’s a track about what man calls ‘time’ and your perception of it through sound. Which is why I didn’t appreciate Garland’s use of it in the episode where the whole thing is chopped up and spliced together into about a minute or two... that’s not the point of the music at all although, I appreciate Garland was also maybe making a comment about the way analogue recording devices can be hijacked and re-used for a different purpose in the digital world.

But... yeah, nothing much more I want to say about DEVS, I think. A nice production with some nice direction from Garland (better perhaps than the writing although he certainly has an ear for dialogue), nice music, some outstanding performances and a certain sense of intrigue which, although it kinda falls flat at the end, keeps you mostly entertained as you go through the episodes. Also, if you’re a fan of Garland’s other stuff, then this sits right alongside it thematically and is probably right up your street. So give this one a whirl, for sure.

Doctor Who - The Timeless Children

Without Time Or Treason

Doctor Who - The Timeless Children
UK BBC1 Airdate: 1st March 2020

Warning: Spoilers I guess

Well this was just a bit rubbish.

I had my fingers crossed this would be a good series finale but, alas, it really didn’t live up to the teasers laid out earlier in the year.

Okay, so I’ll do my usual shout out to the four really good things in the show at the moment... Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Mandip Gill and Tosin Cole. They were all really great in this, as per usual although, it has to be said, they had some terrible lines to get through at certain points in the episode.

That’s it... that’s the good stuff.

Following on from last week’s episode, it’s kinda revealed that Brendan, who I’d assumed was The Lone Cyberman, was actually probably The Doctor or, rather, a false memory of The Doctor implanted when her mind was wiped by her fellow Timelords because, unbeknownst to her (and to the loyal audience of the past 50 plus years) she was actually part of a secret team of special agents sent to wander around the galaxy giving help to those in need. Oh... and she’s also not a Timelord at all now but a mysterious alien from another dimension who taught a scientist from Gallifrey who took it in, how to regenerate... so yeah, that’s a lot.

I don’t mind them updating the origins of The Doctor a little bit, to be honest and that’s not my biggest problem with this episode. I’ll get onto that in a little while. And, also, it does help certain glaring continuity errors over the years such as the ‘Fourth Doctor’ having had so many previous lives shown to us in the 1970s story The Brain Of Morbius. Although, it also kinda screws that continuity too because, with this retro-fitted back story, he surely shouldn’t have been able to remember them in the first place.

Of course, none of this explains how, in the past, lady Timelords can try on new regenerations like changing clothes in a high street store or the fact that a future incarnation of The Doctor is the Valyard but, well, I guess at least they’re trying, right?

One of the issues I have with this episode is that certain things were just unbelievably obvious. For instance, the humans including two of The Doctor’s companions trapped on the Cybership get the bright idea to wear Cyberman armour to get off the ship. So immediately the first thing the mind jumps to is... well then please don’t let them have a terribly clichéd bit of Deus Ex Machina when someone is about to die at the hands of the Cybermen but then their friends are also around in Cyber armour to save the day. But, yeah... of course that happened. This is so jaded by now... would have worked much better in the sixties, methinks (and probably did). But this wasn’t my main problem with it.

Another problem was that all that stuff about not giving The Lone Cyberman what it wants, as per Captain Jack’s warning in the one outstanding episode of the series, was a bit if a red herring. In fact, The Doctor was able to use The Lone Cyberman to save the day, kinda, at the end of the story. Also, since that was therefore redundant and there was no Captain Jack in sight... well, bit of a nonsense then really, wasn’t it? That wasn’t my main problem with the episode though.

Also, was anyone listening when it was revealed that the death particle housed in The Lone Cyberman’s armour would destroy all organic life in the universe? Because, you know, a character cracked that particle at the end and it meant the destruction of Gallifrey, certainly but... yeah... not actually the universe now, was it? That wasn’t my main problem with the story though.

Oh, and did anyone notice that the Judoon who came to sling The Doctor into pokey at the end of the episode just materialised into her TARDIS with complete ease? Because... that’s not an easy thing to do, is it? Sneak onto the TARDIS undetected. There’s force fields and the like. That wasn’t my main grumble with this week’s show though.

But while I’m at it... did anyone notice the episode was called The Timeless Children? Not, The Timeless Child, who was revealed as an alien organism who became The Doctor. So I assume the other timeless child is perhaps The Master? I dunno because, nobody even thought to write in a sentence or two explaining why it was called The Timeless Children now, did they? Unless it was also referring to the new Cybermen/Time Lord hybrids. Who knows? But even that wasn’t my biggest problem with this one.

You want to know what my biggest issue with this week’s episode was? Stop reading now if you don’t because it’s not mandatory that, just because you got through the rest of this whiny review you don’t have to bother with the last bit...

Okay, if you’re still with me... my biggest problem was this...

It was so dull.

Doctor Who used to be a fun show... even when it was getting very dark. This was not really all that entertaining... it was kinda of like a soporific actually. Even with nobody mentioning Omega or Rassilon (which is fine, they kinda brushed through their invention with one sentence), it was still spectacularly yawn inducing. I mean Whitaker was absolutely brilliant but she had some really stupid stuff to try and sell here. The fact is she did it pretty well but... did this feel like quality writing?

I dunno. Maybe I’ve just outgrown the show in some way... although I still enjoy a lot of the older ones up until the start of Matt Smith so, maybe not. I’m kinda glad that I don’t have to review anymore of these new Doctor Who stories until either Christmas or the New Year, in the upcoming Revolution Of The Daleks special, that's for sure. There will still be plenty of old school Doctor Who reviews coming to the blog over the next 9 months though... starting with a forthcoming look at the classic story The Ark In Space.

As for The Timeless Children though.. I wouldn’t recommend it, to be honest. Especially if you’re a Doctor Who fan.

Requiem

The Cello-ship Of The Thing

Requiem
Airdate: 2nd February -  9th March 2018
BBC 1 Six Episodes

I don’t often watch TV shows if I can help it...

There are a few special ones, sure... but, on the whole, they tend to divert too much time away from my blog for too little return in terms of reviews to be published. However, I do occasionally make an exception and, in this case, it was as a result of a review on the internet which highlighted that this was actually a horror show (a rare thing for modern day BBC)  and the reviewer seemed quite enthusiastic about it. He even singled out the musical score by Dominik Scherrer (with Natasha Khan) as being... well... more than something to write home about so, obviously, I needed to have a look at this one. In truth, it had sold me on the idea because I well remember some of the outstanding horror themed TV shows of the past such as the Quatermass serials, Sapphire & Steel and The Omega Factor and I just, somehow, assumed this one would be an echo to the kind of quality of writing and production that the various stations used to put into these things back in the day.

Alas... that’s not quite the case here.

Now, if you only watched the very first episode of Requiem, I can understand why you’d probably be put off from watching another. Episode One is particularly dreadful on a number of counts. For instance, the main character, internationally famous cello sensation Matilda Gray, played by Lydia Wilson, seems a bit inconsistent as a cellist when you compare what her hands are doing when they cut from a long shot to close up and back again. Not much continuity in tempo there, I can tell you. Also, when one of the characters slashes their throat right in front of Matilda, I found it a bit hard to swallow when I realised that the dead character’s eyes kept looking around in at least two of the shots. Seriously, if the actress couldn’t hold the pose then just don’t let the footage run that long.

Both of these things in themselves could be overlooked but the main problem here is that the ‘timing’ of the horror elements in this particular episode is appallingly ineffective. I would have thought they’d have saved the definitive presence of an unseen terror at least until the end of the first one, to be honest but, the abundant appearances of ‘ghostly spirits’ and badly timed set pieces does nothing to hold the atmosphere, it has to be said. Worse than that, the identity of the person who Matilda and her musical sidekick Hal Fine (as portrayed kind of interestingly by Joel Fry here) try to find when they take a ‘time out’ to investigate shenanigans which might make sense of the bizarre death I mentioned earlier, is pretty obvious to work out once you are about twenty minutes into the first episode. Blindingly obvious.

So why did I bother watching all six, you might ask?

Well, I very nearly didn’t but I was impressed that the identity of the person I mentioned above was not held until the last episode but was, in fact, revealed at the end of the first. That meant they had to be going somewhere else with the storyline and so I thought I might as well watch the next one to see what happens next.

Thankfully, the second episode is a heck of a lot better than the first and the ghostly shenanigans are pretty much put on hold until the end of the episode. This pretty much enables the writers and performers time to build up a certain amount of intrigue and atmosphere so, by the end of the second one, I was much more into the whole thing. Although, the series doesn’t quite sustain that standard right the way through to the end, it has to be said.

Now, there is some nice stuff in here such as some excellent sound design and the odd shot where the framing looks well designed to take advantage of the placement of the characters within their environment. However, there’s still a lot of bad stuff too.

For instance, the main protagonist is someone I found I could find no sympathy for at all. Most of the time she comes across as a selfish, entitled youngster who is used to always having her own way and seems intent to ignore the people around her who actually care about her and want her to succeed. Now that may, on reflection, have been the whole point of the way that character was written and played (going by something one of the characters reveals in the last episode) but, if that was the case, it certainly didn’t do me any favours. I was far more interested in the exploits of the local bar maid, played by Sian Reese-Williams and her developing relationship with Hal or the adventures of the local police sergeant played by Clare Calbraith, than I was the main protagonist. I really didn’t care what happened to Matilda by the end of the show and I guess that’s possibly a problem for this kind of story.

The other thing was that, for a TV show trying to be, presumably, a cutting edge horror tale which is broadcast after the watershed, I found the levels of nudity compared to their necessity in certain scenes preposterously low during the moments which were obviously written to exploit such things. The BBC iPlayer made a point of warning me that 'the following show' had ‘upsetting scenes’ and ‘sexual situations’ and... well I think that’s false advertising, to a certain degree. I can never figure out how you can take a series shots of a naked lady in a shower and still manage to not show much of her body. If you don’t want to show her body then... hey, that’s fair enough... but then why set the scene in a shower in the first place? It wasn’t necessary.

Similarly, I’m all for having sex scenes in a show but why the heck, when the bedsheets are flung back after an evening of frantic lovemaking, would you reveal that the heroine of the piece still has her bra on? How unreal and harmful to the pseudo-reality of the story is that? I mean who actually behaves this way in real life? Unbelievable.

So, yeah, there are some problems with the show but I did find that for four of the episodes... numbered two to five... I was sufficiently hooked and intrigued to say that I really enjoyed it a lot. And, yes, that original review I read was right... the music is pretty good and I would certainly grab a copy if a CD soundtrack was released of this one.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say that the series was unable to sustain the levels of intrigue for the sixth and final episode which is, if I’m honest, as much of a mess as the first one was. I quite liked that some things which seemed a little like loose ends were the writers trying to be subtle and allowing the audience to fill in the blanks by themselves but, one of the scenes towards the end actually undercuts the lack of bloodletting you know is coming by having a quick, abstract shot in flashback followed by, a short while after, a shot of four shallow graves including an arm sticking out with a watch that really does try and spell things out for the audience in the least engaging way possible. I mean, if you were going to allude to what the fate of some of the characters was going to be, withhold a certain event and then show us anyway, you might have been a lot better off just showing us what occurred in the first place.

Also, it has to be said that the final fate of the main protagonist, Matilda, is pretty obvious once you get to a certain point here and so the various epilogue scenes seemed quite redundant and you are just waiting for the writer and director to spell it all out again... just in case you hadn’t already worked it out (while I would have said that it was almost impossible not to figure it all out in advance). The show starts going ‘The Full Wheatley’ (Dennis, that is) from the second episode in so you can pretty much work out where all this is going. So what we have is an unsatisfying ending which wasn’t exactly unexpected and which will probably leave most fans of the horror genre a little unsatisfied, truth be told.

At the end of the day, I’m kind of half glad I watched this one because four of the six episodes were at least interesting but, in all honesty, I don’t think I could recommend this one to most people... especially if they are horror fans. There are a lot better genre exercises than this out there and, maybe this one is a little bit of a time suck that a lot of people wouldn’t need. Which is not, I promise you, what I was hoping to write about Requiem.

Doctor Who - The Girl Who Died

And The Horse They Odin On

Doctor Who - The Girl Who Died
UK Airdate: 17th October 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Some spoilers here.

So episode five of the current series, much to my surprise, is another first rate episode. It’s technically another two parter and indeed the story should continue, in a way, next week... just with a different set of characters and locations, aside from the one important supporting character, it would seem... The Girl Who Died.

It’s a very simple story and it’s one which leaves The Doctor and Clara in a situation where all they have to help them are their wits and The Doctor’s special MacGyver powers to make the most out of the various things you can find in a small viking village in order to save the day. This time it comes at a price, the consequences of which will doubtless be explored in the next episode following on from this... The Woman Who Lived.

So, yeah, this episode starts with the tail end of an off screen adventure where The Doctor wards off an entire battle fleet while simultaneously rescuing a stranded Clara in space before the brain eating spider working its way up her costume can have her for dinner. All well and good but when the two stop for a quick breather, to catch up on what just happened and the limits of their allowed involvement, they are back in viking times and promptly captured by a band of the said fellows who take them back to their village. Two things to note is that they are now two days by boat from the TARDIS and, hooray, The Doctor’s sonic sunglasses are snapped in half and, though they do make use of them still... well, let’s just hope that he doesn’t make any new ones anytime soon and he can get a new screwdriver manufactured by the TARDIS before the next episode comes into play.

The story gets underway properly when a species of aliens, the leader of whom represents himself as Odin and projects his image into the sky, culls the village of all its fighters, effectively making them into a protein shake to drink, and then accepts a challenge by the title character of this story to come back the next day and fight the warriors. That is to say, they’ll come back and slaughter the rest of the village the next day. So immediately, The Doctor and Clara are put into a Seven Samurai kind of situation (or The Magnificent Seven, if that’s you’re preferred pop cultural reference here) and have to train up the remaining villagers to fight... even though they realise it will be futile.

Of course, before the episode is over, The Doctor manages to MacGyver some stuff up from the local blacksmith’s forge and, using handy electric eels, helps the locals defeat the alien menace. However, the price is the death of the girl who challenged the alien race in the first place. And this is where it gets really interesting in terms of continuity with the series because The Doctor finds a way to save her too... but the reasons he does this are a neat fix on something which may have been bothering a minority of the viewers of the show for a while.

You see, Doctor Who is a big and long running show here in the UK. Pretty much most British actors have a role in it at some point or another and many of them return again for different and, quite often, more famous or longer lasting roles over the 52 year history of the show. Nicholas Courtney, for example, played a recurring character in a long story in the William Hartnell years before returning in Patrick Troughton’s era as Colonel Lethbridge-Stuart, who was soon to be promoted to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stuart and who worked with quite a few of The Doctor’s over the years before his death a few years ago. Similarly, future Doctor Colin Baker starred in a minor role in a story in the show years before. The second incarnation of the time lord companion Romana regenerated into a character she liked from the previous series, naturally played by the same actress. So there is a precedent for this in the show and that last example is a pertinent one here because the writers acknowledged the actress' likeness in the story and came up with a justification for it...

Now Peter Capaldi is no stranger to the Doctor Who universe. He played a major role in the third series of Torchwood and, more importantly here, played a great character in the David Tennant story The Fires Of Pompeii. The Doctor acknowledged in the first proper Peter Capaldi story that he recognised the face from somewhere and wondered why his body had chosen it... with a few careful and quick flashbacks to both of those stories we now have the reason for The Doctor’s face being the same as one which occurred in the earlier episode used here... as a reminder that sometimes you don’t always have to leave people behind. Which is possibly unnecessary but it’s certainly a nice touch.

The episode is loaded with references to other pop culture references too... from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum to Noggin The Nog and the writer certainly must have had a lot of fun with this one. The story is pretty cool in its own right too and the simplicity of stripping away the technology and throwing The Doctor in at the deep end to manufacture the tech and use what he’s got to ‘capture’ upgraded technology both works really well and gives the characters a chance to shine in a simpler environment. There’s some really nice character building going on here, not least of which is shown in the way The Doctor saves the girl who died. Reprogramming an alien field kit he heals her back to life after death but... there’s a catch. The field kit absorbed in her body will never stop repairing her. She won’t age and won’t die ever... or so we’re told. And we learn, or are reminded (to be more accurate) of The Doctor’s regret about him outliving all his friends when he leaves her with a second reprogrammed field kit... so when she meets the person she wants to share the curse of immortality with, she has the power to make it happen.

That being said, I don’t think things will quite play out that way. I think next week we’ll find that there is another option to immortality and that the second field kit may well go unused. We shall see what we shall see and I’m kinda hoping I’m wrong on that count. So fingers crossed.

All in all though, The Girl Who Died is probably the best episode of the current series so far, which is saying a lot since even the slight duds have been pretty good episodes. Entertaining, well performed, more than adequate special effects, the reminder of The Doctor’s ability to ‘speak baby’ and, to top it off, maybe even a little thought provoking. Can’t ask for much more than all that on a Saturday evening science fiction TV show I reckon. Good job all around. Will be interesting to see where the next part of this story takes us.