Category / television

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Iced Blondes

Wisting (Directed by Trygve Allister Diesen and Katarina Launing, 2019)

I stumbled across Wisting a couple of months ago in the nether regions of iPlayer and downloaded the first episode a couple of months ago. I confess I’ve never seen The Bridge (soon to be a Radio 4 programme), nor Wallander, nor the original version of The Killing (but most of the American version). I did see Modus (possibly in reverse order) and Svartsjön (ultimately silly, but verging on the Todorovian fantastic, if I recall correctly), so my scandinoir experiences are thin (I think I gave up after the second film in The Girl with the Increasingly Passive Character trilogy). Continue reading →

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Spall’s Well That Ends Well

Electric Dreams: “The Commuter” (Tom Harper, 2017)

Now this is more like it — a fantasy partly set at Woking Station.

Funnily enough, I was looking at train times to Woking today and I’ve been there a couple of times. It get destroyed in War of the Worlds.

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Nothing is Impossible

Electric Dreams: “Impossible Planet” (David Farr, 2017)

One thing that struck me about the anthology series opener, “The Hood Maker”, was the openness of its ending — not in a Tales of the Unexpected twist way, but a leaving it open way. This week’s adaptation has another ambiguous ending, but in a more PhilDickian way and so inevitably, spoilers ahoy.

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Teeps n the Hood

Electric Dreams: The Hood Maker (Julian Jarrold, 2017)

Ok, what I’m not going to do is laboriously compare these Channel 4 PKD Estate sanctioned adaptations to the originals, partly because the f-word is not necessarily useful to criticism and partly because the collected stories are currently behind a pile of boxes. And it’s also worth noting that, frankly, some of the short stories are pretty ropey. See, say, “Paycheck”, which the film might just about improve on. So I’m ignoring the fact that this version of “The Hood Maker” shifts emphases, instead focusing on a general sense of the PhilDickian.

The jizz of Dick, to borrow a term from birding.

Oh, and spoilers.
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What Pride Comes Before

Plot details will be discussed and possibly mocked.

Doctor Who: “The Doctor Falls”

So, let’s see: what do we know about Bill? I don’t think there’s any mention of her father and we know her mother is dead — the Doctor got her some photos as part of her recruitment. The memories of her mother were part of defeating the monks, as preserving her self identity.

What will survive of us is lurve, it turns out.
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Light Eater

Diripientium
Doctor Who: “The Eaters of Light”

Not only do we have a rare use of a female writer on Nu Who — Rona Munro (the second this series) — but we have the first use of a writer from Classic Who, who wrote the last serial of that era, “Survival”, featuring the Ainley-era Master and a lesbian subtext between Ace and Kara.
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Mars Attack

Spoilers on ice
Doctor Who: “Empress of Mars”

So a few weeks back, we weren’t allowed a reference to Harry Sullivan, companion for Tom Baker’s first season and the opening of the second, as well as appearing in a later serial, because no one would remember him.

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Monks’ Childhood Memory

Spoiler Heap

Doctor Who: “The Lie of the Land”

And so we come to the end of the Monks Trilogy — although the finale may yet return to them as Missy has been mixed up with them.

With all this virtuality around, you can imagine a much better episode exploring the memory police and the dystopia that’s Nineteen Eighty-Four-lite. Someone actually trying to resist and then being arrested. Instead of a reset button.

Instead we get the Doctor going in with a militia, all guns blazing, with a possibility that he might have to kill Bill, even though he says the safest place in the world for her is by his side. To be fair, she has already shot him — and he goes into a fake regeneration that last week’s next week teased us with.

The Monks have replaced our reality with a new history where they have always been (and the president is orange) and they’ve even redesigned the rather narrow streets around St Paul’s Cathedral where the pyramid has landed. (Is it an Illuminati reference? A dollar bill? Camel cigarettes?)

It is a fairly obviously plot, but the scriptwriter Toby Whithouse doesn’t trust us, nor does the composer. Murray Gold’s soundtrack is less intrusive than it usually is, but it still needs to Shut The Fuck Up for much longer. Bill is given a couple of great speeches and Pearl Mackay delivers them with gusto, but the subtlety is undercut by the sodding music telling us to emote. We also have Bill imagining the dead mother that the Doctor photographed back in “The Pilot”, so she can do Fake News for herself, but this is undercut by leading to a narration of what is an obvious set of manoeuvres which make sense without voiceover and we are distracted by wondering when this happened.

It also clues us into the end of the Monks — although David Archer has evidently gone back to sorting out the IBR on Brookfield. They were let into the world by love and will be expelled by it. Bill’s memory is touching and a little unconvincing — no anger at her dying? — and her heroism is undermined by the Doctor’s speech TELLING US.

Pedants would note that we don’t really know what the Monks got out of this invasion and whether a multimillenia dry run really helped, and if they really wanted to be loved then maybe they could use a little moisturiser or fake their appearances.

We don’t really know what they got out of this invasion and whether a multimillenia dry run really helped, and if they really wanted to be loved then maybe they could use a little moisturiser or fake their appearances.

I’m not sure how Margot knew that Bill had been to Australia, either. He wasn’t there, was he? There’s a brief acknowledgment of him nearly dying in “The Pyramid at the End of the World” and I can’t help but feel that the gaps between the episodes are disjointed in the wrong way.

Meanwhile, back at the STORY ARC, Missy is going cold turkey from evil and is asked her advice on how to defeat the Monks. Her solution is somewhat utilitarian, the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one, but clearly she has some way to go. She has a few decent lines questioning the Doctor’s version of good, but she keeps being directed to eat the scenery. It is neat that — like the Doctor — she does remember the names of everyone she killed. Maybe she has a conscience after all.

We’ll see.

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Monks’ Anxiety

Spoilery McSpoilface.

Doctor Who: “The Pyramid at the End of the World”

Bill, for reasons that are no clearer than she’s on the opening credits, is picked up by an American general and the Secretary General of the United Nation, interrupting the real date that replaced the virtual date from last week (and I wonder if this is going to be a thing — we are repeatedly informed she is a lesbian, but she won’t be allowed past first base. There was Heather, too, don’t forget). When there is a crisis, the Doctor gets to be president of the world (although note that the dead president last week doesn’t have the orange look Bill mentions) and the current crisis is the appearance of a five thousand year old pyramid, which has landed between the American, Russian and Chinese armies, threatening… well, oddly getting between them so you’d think it’d be safer.

How do they know it’s five thousand years old?

They just do, okay.

And it’s home to monks, because everyone knows that monks live in pyramids, wearing particularly tasteful curtains.

Look, this episode is co-written by the guy who did the Moon-egg-butterfly-Moon-egg episode, which makes The Clangers look like a Larry Niven novel.

Somewhere, the end of the world is underway, as at a research lab the hungover scientist Douglas screws up an experiment and the cock up isn’t clocked by short-sighted Erica. (Erica, I like, I could bear more of Erica.) The whole world is in danger of being poisoned by them. Fortunately, the Doctor is able to find them, thanks to Margot hacking the security cameras — the Doctor couldn’t do the hacking because he’s visually impaired — yes I know he’s already hacked two computer systems since he lost his sight, don’t quibble. He also gets locked in the lab in question. Because the sonic screwdriver won’t work on a combination lock. Because labs use mechanical locks.

Obviously.

Meanwhile, the Monks are offering to help, but will only do so if asked — shades of the Doctor asking Bill if he can save the world in ”Thin Ice”. In return for saving the world, they will want the world, which they have been practicing to invade since humanity crawled out of the slime.

Yes, I know it would be a pain in the butt if after all that humanity didn’t want help. You’d think they’d asked for consent before they were so committed, but the practices clearly told them Bill would oblige…

Yes, Bill, after the Secretary General and the three military leaders asked, but apparently not in the right way.

Do these monks want to invade or not? David Archer must have cows he has to get back to milk.

Bill has finally learned — and you wouldn’t think her so dumb — that the Doctor hasn’t got his sight back. She can ask for help, with love, and not fear, honest, unlike the Secretary General, so sight is restored.

How?

Don’t ask. You should be more worried about the STORY ARC and that Margot is apparently dead in the TARDIS and

Will nobody think of the Vault?