The Cutprice Guignol

I spent a long time trying to put my finger on the correct word to sum up this episode- over-written? Pointed? Conducted with all the subtlety of a beating with a rusty spade? But the word I’m going with is laboured, because that’s what this episode was. Not necessarily awful, but The Zygon Inversion (which DIDN’T involve ant Zygons getting turned inside out by killer gas, boo!) felt as if it had a whole lot of episode to fill with a scant amount of plot.

The Doctor attempts to maintain the ceasefire between the Zygons and the humans as a the leader of the revolutionary Zygons, who also happens to be in Clara’s body, does everything s/he can to start a war. In order to do this, s/he needs to get hold of Osgood’s box-whoops, no the Osgood box, which will determine the fate of the earthbound Zygons. And in between those plot points, there’s lots and lots of….talking.

Kate was there, and she was…pretty fine, I guess.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good talky episode of Who as much of the next person (the sublime Boom Town springs immediately to mind). But, well, I think the Robot Devil can put it better than I ever could-

Over and over again, Peter Harness and Steven Moffat (co-credited as writing this script) seemed too busy jumping to the next forced joke or clunky moral plot point to have anyone express anything without having to have it underlined a thousand times by someone else. And, like The Woman Who Lived a few weeks back, everything seemed curiously repetitive, especially the climactic scene between Kate, Zygella and the Doctor. The Doctor’s giant, dramatic speech-which felt like it went on for at least 75% of the episode- wavered between Peter Capaldi managing to just pull it back into watchable, and repeating the same point over and over and over and over again to the point of brain-implosion. A point which barely even stands anymore, since the events of Day of the Doctor (I get why he was keen to stop the war from happening, but is it really fair to invoke the “I CARRY AROUND THE SCREAMS OF A MILLION PEOPLE I MURDERED” when you, um, didn’t actually murder them?).

THE THRILLING CLIMAX

Add to that a handful of annoying plotholes-if Kate could shoot the Zygon dead, why didn’t the armed U.N.I.T soldiers do that last episode? If there are only 20 million Zygons on Earth and they can be easily killed with firearms, the war really isn’t going to pose that much of a problem, is it? If the Doctor has had to diffuse situations like this one before, as implied by the “last fifteen times” line, why don’t they just remove the Zygons from Earth? And the biggest one of all: why the fucking Christ would U.N.I.T agree to settle Zygons on Earth after they TRIED TO TAKE IT OVER?- and this script was pretty awful, especially compared to last week’s tight, exciting thriller. It just didn’t have much to work with, with most of the plot being dealt with (and swiftly forgotten) last episode.

There were a couple of good scenes, that said- I’m coming round to Osgood(s) in a big way, as Ingrid Oliver managed to balance the charm and quirk with the sense of duty really nicely and was just generally really watchable. The other set of doubles in the episode- the two Claras- were not quite as good, despite a very cool scene where Evil!Clara tries to figure out the location of the Osgood box and the two of them have a bit of a mental joust. I really didn’t care for Jenna Coleman in this episode, who looked for a lot of the runtime as if she was phoning it in with one foot out the door, which is a shame but fits pretty well with the patchy nature of the writing for her character(s) since the start of this season.

One thing that did strike me about this episode, and this series by extension, is the problems they seem to have balancing fun with serious. The Zygon Inversion had a lot of stuff to say about the pointlessness of war (with a weirdly out-of-place reference to the Glorious Revolution, for what it’s worth), but the only way it could get it’s point across was through repetition ad finitum and Peter Capaldi doing that awful game show voice. The show has shown over and over again that it can balance rollicking fun with serious moral points (David Tennant’s first proper episode New Earth springs to mind), but the last couple of seasons have lurched awkwardly between stilted jokes and overly serious moralilty without taking the time to fit the two together. There hasn’t been a really outrightly fun episode this season- Under the Lake had it’s moments, as did The Woman Who Lived, but both revolved around heavy central ideas-and I feel like the show is starting to get a little bogged down in it’s seriousness. That all said, next week is a found footage episode with Reese Shearsmith in it, and therefore was created expressly for me!

AND the Zygons still look like demon Mr Blobbys. I’ll have you yet, Moffar.

I really, really, really like football. I have done as long as I can remember. So many memories from my teen years revolve around the sport-whether getting up at ungodly hours of the morning to watch Match of the Day (I had a mug that played the theme song and everything! It broke after about two weeks and I would occasionally wake up to the jaunty refrain echoing off the walls of the house as it malfunctioned), playing in my school’s team (I was defence, because it’s impossible to get anything past my ego), or heading down to the pub to watch the World Cup with my usually uninterested friends caught up in the excitement of the tournament, it’s always been part of my life. I’m sure there are a bunch of people rolling their eyes right now because, yes, football is pointless and stupid and everyone is overpaid and at the end of the day it essentially means nothing. But it entertains me, and I like pottering around on a Saturday afternoon listening to whatever matches BBC have deemed acceptable to broadcast this week.

But in the last couple of months or so, I’ve had the growing feeling that I’m not….welcome in the football world. I’m not the first to say this, and I won’t be the last, but sometimes I just want to enjoy my football in peace. And by that, I mean without having to justify or prove my interest in it.

I put off writing this article for ages and ages, because there are surely far more important things to concern myself with than whether or not some bloke at the pub thinks I’m only there because I’m trying to impress my boyfriend. But then, twice in two days at university this week, a couple of my tutors made offhand comments about women not being interested in sports. And that’s certainly not the most offensive assumption that I’ve heard about my gender, but it’s still sexism and is still worth talking about, especially when it’s so alright to crack wise about it even in apparently neutral positions of authority.

I could easily list a hundred instances where someone has challenged my interest in football, but you’ve heard them all before: chatting to a guy in the smoking area during half-time and having him ask what team my boyfriend supported, and being surprised when I replied “the same team as me”; having a bloke demand to know the scores of the last three matches my team played in to “prove” I followed the sport; being told, through jokes and quips and outright statements, that women who like sports are an anomaly who are either faking it to impress a guy or unable to possibly comprehend the passion that “real” fans (read: men) have for it. I  spoke to my boyfriend-who is just as big an anorak about football as I am- if he’d had similar responses when he’d mentioned his love of the sport, and the answer was a firm no.

And that is, of course, not to mention the actually game itself- fans making sexist jokes about the inclusion of women in the Fifa 16 game, Manchester United fans screaming abuse at a female doctor earlier this year, Andy Grey and Richard Keys joking about how a senior lineswoman would need to offside rule explained to her, etc, etc, ad finitum.  Women are not welcomed to the sport the way men are, and that’s just stupid.

I’m sure there are a few football fans reading this and thinking “I don’t care/am happy to see anyone get into football, regardless of gender!”. And you’re golden- this isn’t aimed at you. But, to all those people who hear that a woman likes or is involved with football and feel the need to interrogate her or get her to justify her interest, stop. Stop it. Stop it forever. We’re starting to sea the tide turn-very slowly- on women involved in football, whether that’s on the pitch or in the stands, and every time you demand a woman prove her love for the sport based on whatever arbitrary standards you’ve come up with, you’re pushing in the wrong direction. All I want is to be able to enjoy the sport I love in peace. And if one more person tries, unasked, to explain to offside rule to me, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

So, I wrote about the season premiere of American Horror Story: Hotel a couple of weeks ago. And I stand by everything I said in that review– it’s tasteless, pointless, and plain horrible. That said, I couldn’t help but enjoy the last couple of weeks- after a wobbly third and fourth season (come on, fight me), it seems that they’re finally re-stabilising their balance in how to tell a coherent, season-long story. Also, Evan Peters plays a Vincent Price-esque serial killer and Angela Basset is a B-movie star from the seventies. It’s a hoot, and while I’m still sort of braced at the start of every episode for something that will undermine the good work they’ve done so far, I’ll take what I can get. Oh, spoilers, by the way.

But oh, when did a Ryan Murphy show ever get off that easily in this blog? One of the things that I did notice about this season, and something that crops up across all kinds of TV all the freakin’ time, is the problematic way they frame bisexuality and especially non-hereto sexual activity. So, let’s take a look at all the plots so far that have involved bisexuality in some form or another:

1. In the first episode, the Countess and Donovan invite another couple to their bed, where they then brutally murder them and drink their blood.
2. The Countess and Ramona Royale are shown to be in a relationship, one that ends with the Countess shooting Ramona’s new (male, for what it’s worth) lover dead. It’s also interesting to note here that, despite the fact that the Countess and Ramona were together for years, Ramona describes her relationship with her new man (who’s only shown in two scenes, one of which he is dead for much of) as much more significant and passionate.
3. Tristan (in a relationship with a woman at the time) seduces Will Drake with the express purpose of murdering him.
4. Tristan picks up a gay guy on Tinder, and apparently seems to enjoy making out with him, then murders him.

I think it would be missing a big ol’ point in AHS to ignore the fact that sex is bad for everyone on this show. I think there’s maybe one (?) fully consummated, consensual bit of love-making in the series five-year run and that ends with her being abducted by aliens (man, season two was crazy). And the straight sex (nor indeed the straight characters) in this season hasn’t exactly been a glowing bastion against which I will measure all my sexual encounters-it’s been unfulfilling, creepy, or just plain depressing. But when the first three episodes of your show feature four characters whose non-mono-sexuality connects directly to their inhuman and murderous natures, there’s a bit of a problem there.

And we’re what, four episodes in? Maybe I wouldn’t have my ears quite so pricked for this particular trope, but it seems like it’s been everywhere in the last few years. The tacit connection drawn between being interested in more than one gender and being in some way inhuman or, at the very least, deeply unpleasant, appears in a whole bunch of shows- off the top of my head, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (where the vampires are almost all bisexual, but the lead cast members CAN’T EVEN CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY OF IT), True Blood (same again), the murderous and immortal Dorian Grey in Penny Dreadful, Lee Garner in Mad Men, Crowley in Supernatural, Frank Underwood in House of Cards, June Stahl in Sons of Anarchy, the female HG Wells in Warehouse 13….oh, and that’s not forgetting Ryan Murphy’s own inimitable addition to the genre, were the only long-running bisexual characters in his show Nip/Tuck were incestuous siblings, one of whom was the murderer/rapist Carver.

I’m glad for bisexual representation on TV (doubly so when they actually call it bisexuality, but that’s another story), but there comes a point when show after show after show after show depicts bisexuality as something that goes hand-in-hand with a depraved, often downright evil nature, when I feel like I have a right to object. Christ, the vampires = bisexual trope is so pervasive that I sometimes wonder if I’m actually a bloodsucking minion of the undead (on a side note, while I can appreciate the metaphor for gay rights in the vampires in True Blood, when you think about it even a little bit it’s hilariously badly conceived and offensive). I’m not demanding that everyone who shows bisexual proclivities HAS TO be a bastion of all that’s good and pure in the world, just that they’re not always vampires (or otherwise evil).

Sure, any person who identifies with any sexuality can be evil or good or anywhere in between, but when the depictions of bisexual people so often seem to equate an interest in both genders with a callous, cold, or otherwise inhumane nature, it gets a bit…on the nose. We get it, you think we’re all off having drunken, dimly-lit sex orgies that you’re not invited to and you’re jealous- but don’t take it out on our TV representations.

So, last month, this blog reached it’s three-year anniversary. That’s kind of insane, considering that I started this thing just to pass the time when I was stuck in my dorm room with no-one to talk to back in first year (joke’s on them, because now I have a cat to talk to. Oh, and friends, a boyfriend, whatever) and build up some links for my portfolio. In the last year, I finished my brutal love affair with Fifty Shades of Grey, started my genuine love affair with Doctor Who recaps, and wrote a bunch of stuff on sexuality, feminism, mental health, and other topics that I never thought I would ever have had the balls to write about in public. So, firstly, a huge, mega thank-you to everyone who’s supported the blog over the last three years- all your shares and likes and comments and reads have made this worthwhile, and there’s no way I’d be doing this without you. I just hit a thousand followers a couple of weeks ago, which still boggles my mind a little bit. You’re awesome, and I’ll buy all of you a pint next time I see you.

The Cutprice Guignol has provided an awesome jumping-off point for me into the world of freelance writing, and that brings me to my next point. With my official job title being “jobbing freelance writer”, I spend most of my time writing something or other (movie reviews, album critiques, alien erotica, etc) and that takes away time I get to spend writing for the blog. As I’m not getting paid for the work I do here, I can’t really justify spending as much time on it as I’d like and I can’t always take on the cool ideas my readers pass on to me. As a poor student about to be an even poorer graduate, I’ve had to seriously think about whether or not I can financially justify spending so much time on The Cutprice Guignol.

So, to remedy that I’ve created a Patreon. For the uninitiated, a Patreon lets readers and supporters of the blog sponsor me a small amount of money per month so I can keep doin’ what I’m doin’ (and hopefully improve it, too). There are special rewards based on how much you sponsor me (including exclusive blog posts), and if I reach a certain amount of sponsorship per month I’ll be able to take on new recapping projects and generally spend more time turning this into a real website. You can check out my Patreon page here for more information, and how to donate. Notable: if the first one of my sponsorship goals is reached, I’ll be recapping the second Fifty Shades of Grey book. Do with that what you will.

To be clear, no matter how much or how little you fabulous people decide to share with me, I’ll keep writing for the blog, and I’ll keep going with my current recapping projects. Any donations I receive will go towards giving me time to get more blog posts up every month and create a better user interface for my readers. Considering that I’m basically jingling a virtual charity tin under your nose, I appreciate any and all donations more than I can express. More than that, I appreciate all the support people who’ve read this blog have given me over the years. Thank you for reading! Here’s to another three years.

So, in August of this year, the FDA approved the “little pink pill”- basically, female Viagra. And it got me to thinking: with Viagra for dudes being so readily available and such a common, shrug-worthy part of society, the way we treat women’s sexual dysfunction is pretty embarrassing. You know how I know that? Because, for three years, I suffered from a type of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD), and no-one seemed to have a god-damn clue what to do with me.

You whisper the words “vaginismus” in front of any woman who’s suffered from it, and you can see that look of haunted horror that passes across their face. Vaginismus is a condition where your vagina essentially boards itself shut, sticks up “closed for business” signs, and leaves you unable to enjoy sex without massive amounts of pain-or, in my case and in the case of many other sufferers, unable to have sex at all. Muscle spasms make it painful or impossible to get anything in there, whether it’s a tampon, an erection, or the cotton swab of a very nice lady who just wants to figure out what the fuck is going on with me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My vaginismus made itself known when I was first dating my high school sweetheart, and what I was feeling seemed to go above and beyond the usual kind of painful-first-penetrative-sex experiences that I’d been conditioned to expect. But I didn’t think much of it until, two years later, I was still unable to get so much as a finger inside myself without crippling pain. Neither me or my then-boyfriend could figure out what was going on, and we both spent months in silence, assuming that I would just never be able to put out and that we’d just have to deal with that shit as it was. In a culture that values sex so highly, especially at the age I was at, there was no way in hell I was telling anyone else that the crunchy sound of a condom wrapper made me flinch.

I couldn’t tell you what the tipping point was, but I eventually found myself, face burning, eyes on the ground, in my school nurse’s office, explaining to her what was happening and borderline begging her for an answer to the problem. Was I frigid? Was I actually gay? Was I just broken in some profound and unfixable way? She nodded sympathetically, then referred me to another doctor, to whom I said much the same thing before being referred to another doctor to whom…yeah, you get the idea. I remember vividly how uncomfortable the people-medical professionals- I discussed this problem with became, and how keen they seemed to palm me off on someone else. It’s not even as if vaginismus is the most uncommon affliction in the world- it’s hard to pinpoint exact numbers, but somewhere in the realm of one in five hundred women suffer from it and it’s even more common amongst women 16-24, which was an age group I fell into. Yet no-one could even give me a name, and I was getting increasingly frantic, assuming that I would never have sex, never have a family, never get one of those Mooncups I’d been hearing so much about.

Eventually, I got referred to a sexual health clinic, and made an appointment. I sat in the waiting room, surrounded by glum-looking folks who looked as if they were waiting on bad news about that herpes test. I found myself confronted with the aforementioned sympathetic lady, pretty much the first who didn’t seem like she was hoping I’d stop talking about my vagina right about now. That appointment marked the first time a woman touched my nether regions, but it’s not an experience I remember fondly- naked from the waist down, trying not to cry from the pain of the cotton swab she had inside me. I cried all the way home, and prayed that this time I might get an answer.

I was visiting a friend’s house a few days later when I got a phone call from the clinic, and they spelled out the name of what they thought I had over the phone. That was it: they just told me what it was. After more than two years, I finally had something to work from, even if that was the last time I ever heard from the clinic. I was out in the wilderness again, and as I began to look up information about my dysfunction, things felt almost as bad as before. Websites recommended dilators, basically small plastic dildos of varying sizes meant to acclimatise your vagina to the intrusion of other accoutrements. Even looking at the weird, almost always pink, almost always weirdly bullet-shaped collections sold in neat packages of eBay, was enough to make me cringe with pain. I resolved that I’d just have to be really, really good at all the other sex stuff and chuck in any chance to have a fulfilling sexual relationship with a man. I clung to my boyfriend, convinced than no other man would ever want a woman who he could barely touch.

Then we split up, and I was faced with the reality of entering a dating world where the ability to have sex is usually assumed. With the leftovers of my student loan, I finally ordered those dilators from online, and spent a tense Christmas break in my childhood bedroom with lots of wine and heavy breathing as I tried to manoeuvre those bastards into me. And eventually, things started to change. Maybe it was a new partner, maybe it was the dilators, maybe it was just sheer bloody-mindedness, but I did it: I was finally able to have painless sex, hell, even to enjoy it. And that’s awesome, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten what it was like to suffer from vaginismus, and wonder how other women who suffer from FSD are being treated.

It might sound like I’m pretty angry about a lot of this, and that’s precisely right. I had a pretty common medical condition whose resolution usually needs a wide variety of different approaches, sometimes including emotional and physical therapy. I never got that. I was never even offered that. Even though it’s long behind me now, you try shaking two and a half years of being convinced that you were frigid and no person who ever want to form a relationship with you because you couldn’t have sex- that shit will mess with you, and still does to this day. If I’d been a man who couldn’t get it up, there would have been myriad options to help me with what I was going through, and at least I would have known that my experiences were common and not exclusive to me. But no- we’re not teaching people about it, we’re not talking about it, and we’re leaving the scores of women who suffer from vaginismus and other sexual dysfunctions out in the cold. My experiences, luckily, are not universal for women who tried to get help, but they’re not unusual either-and, even if we have got a little pink pill to boost our libidos, we’re failing to address the myriad other sexual dysfunctions that might well cause that lack of desire to get down.

So, I want to address this last paragraph to women who are suffering or have suffered from FSD: firstly, it gets better. Even if you think you’re crazy or broken, even if no-one seems to have a clue what’s wrong with you, it can get better, and you deserve to have it taken seriously. Secondly, when you’re ready, talk about it. Talk about it with your friends, your family, write about it, write it in the sky from the engines of a light aircraft. Because every time a woman is dismissed or shut down on the subject of FSD, it blocks an opportunity to educate and hopefully normalise these strikingly common problems, making them less stigmatizing and therefore easier to seek treatment for. Because we deserve better than this.

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Look, I guess I should set one thing straight here, before I begin- I don’t think Community as a show is inherently sexist. Dam Harmon, the man behind the cult-smash sitcom, has made an express effort to hire female writers and create interesting, well-rounded women characters who get just as much respect and screentime as their male counterparts. With an ensemble cast as big as Community’s in it’s heyday (seasons one through three, and I’ll hear no different), it was and still is legitimately awesome to see the strong central female cast taken as seriously as they were, as likely to be cracking the joke as the butt of it. So let’s get that out of the way.

But I was rewatching the show over the last few weeks (I’m back at university, any sort of college-based comedy is a must to float me through the next few months alive, and apparently all I write about now is sexism in sitcoms), and something jumped out at me a few times across the show’s run. And that’s it’s use of ironic (or hipster, depending on what article you read first) sexism.

Ironic sexism is basically when the writers know they’re being sexist, and the audience knows the writers are being sexist, and the joke stems from the fact that everyone is in on the fact that this would be a horrible way to treat women in real life. Let’s take a couple of examples that jumped out at me- the first was in a Christmas episode, where Annie (played by Allison Brie) sings a parody of the dumb sexy-baby-voice tunes meant to appeal to men with fetishes I’d rather not consider, presumably:

And yeah, this is a funny scene. Don’t get me wrong. I like the way they dismantled the ridiculousness of the woman forced to prance around downplaying her intelligence to further appeal to men. But it’s still Allison Brie prancing around and bending over in a little dress. We’re still being invited to objectify her, even if we are all in on the funny joke. Take a look at these scenes, which are basically the same thing twice:

Woo, we’re so enlightened that we can ogle women doing stereotypically sexy things- in an enlightened and non-sexist way! I understand what tropes they’re going after here, by presenting a stupidly overboard version of those tropes, but it’s hard to see two conventionally attractive young women straddling each other while covered in oil and see it as a breakthrough. And, of course, this kind of stuff isn’t contained to Community. It’s in advertising, where women and men are posed outrageously sexily- in a tongue-in-cheek way! It’s on social media, where people order women they disagree with to make them a sandwhich, bitch- but it’s only because they’re totally enlightened and we live in a post-sexist society anyway, right?

Look, I get that they’re trying to critique the ridiculousness of these kinds of tropes here, but is simply regurgitating a trope actually providing a critique of it? I’m genuinely asking. I think it depends n the circumstance, the intention, and lots and lots of other things, but when it comes down to it, simply producing a replica of sexism and calling it funny assumes that everyone observing it is going to understand that that’s a ridiculous or unacceptable way to treat the person in question. But, you know, that’s kind of a gamble when objectifying women in the media   (and more broadly in society) in a non-ironic way (WHY HELLO THERE GAME OF THRONES) is so completely accepted, so normalised. I know a bunch of people who see the joke in the above Community scenes, but still appreciate the chance to ogle the actresses in question, so while those scenes have successfully made the point they wanted to make, they’d sort of undermined themselves. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think you can critique a problematic trope while you’re adding to it, and doubly so when you’re using it as an excuse to stick two of your leading women in fantasy scenarios and outfits for the audience to gawk act. But what’s your take on it?

Prior to the first episode of season nine of Doctor Who being broadcast, I went back and read my reviews for the last season because I’m a massive narcissist I needed to remind myself of the plot seeds Moffat had sewn and I sure as hell wasn’t rewatching Kill the Moon to do it. And reading the review for Deep Breath, I was reminded of how dire that episode really was-flabby, half-baked, poorly paced, and home to a couple of half-decent ideas that came to nothing. Less than nothing. Minus nothing. I could feel the first vestiges of panic begin to set in- if this episode was as bad as Deep Breath, we had a pattern on our hands, and that’s not good news. I don’t think anyone will debate me when I say that season eight as probably the weakest season of the rebooted show to date, with some quite dramatic failures in it’s midst, and the show had a lot to prove with it’s season nine opener, The Magician’s Apprentice.

And it did. Thank God, it did.

Well, not unequivocally- it wouldn’t be one of my patented Doctor Who reviews if I didn’t have a few nitpicks to take from this episode- but it covered up it’s cracks with handfuls of energy and blindingly audacious plotting. And, somehow they brought the Daleks back in such a way that didn’t make me want to punch my screen into dust, so that’s a genuine achievement, something the show hasn’t pulled off since, ooh, the very first Dalek episode in season one (side note: did you know that me and another blogger are reviewing the whole of New Who, episode by episode? You should check that out).

Okay, spoilers here, major ones, for anyone who hasn’t seen the episode. The series kicks off with the Doctor arriving to save a young boy from some nasty traps that threaten to pull him into Pan’s Labyrinth, I assume:

-but when it turns out that the little boy is none other than Davros, creator of the Daleks, he finds himself in a bit of a dilemma. Cut to a few thousand years later, and Davros is demanding the Doctor’s presence as retribution (or thanks?) for what he did or didn’t do to that little boy all those years ago. Missy and Clara get wind of the possible impending-death scenario and tag along for the ride. Yeah, that’s right- Missy AND Davros in one episode. It’s like nemesis central over here, and I love it. Matt Smith must be cursing the Gods that he didn’t get even one of them during his run. I would be.

That hair is a work of art.

Mainly because this episode was pandering directly to me, and people like me. People who are obsessively into the show, who bellow educated guesses at the screen whenever a new mystery asserts itself, people who, to whatever degree, live for the mythology of this show. New fans can probably sit this one out, as it relies so much on you already knowing the dynamics at play between the Doctor and Missy, the Doctor and Davros, the Doctor and Clara, etc, that if you don’t, this whole episode is going to fall pretty flat for you. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, in terms of writing and scene-setting ability, but since I’m about as far as humanely possible from reviewing this episodes objectively, who gives a damn? I loved it, and if you love the show, you will too.

And, since you can’t have Davros without Daleks, we got plenty of the deadly kitchen implements this episode, and I was willing to forgive it. Because, after all, what other DW villains have created a master race of killer androids that were applicable to this story? It was go Davros or go home, and luckily we got treated to another episode of Terry Molloy chanelling a monstrously Shakespearean villain as the legendary father of the Daleks.

And let’s not forget about Missy, either- Michelle Gomez is beyond delicious in this episode, always carefully toeing the line of too camp, too flirty, too on-the-nose, and pulling back just before she goes too far. She’s used a lot better here than she was in Death in Heaven, packing in the one-liners (upon finding out that the Doctor considers Davros his nemesis, she declares “I’ll scratch their eye out” in what amounts to a purr) and maniacal energy into every moment on-screen. She lifts up a mediocre episode for Jenna Coleman, too, even if Clara is just someone for her to exposite at most of the time (if you haven’t heard already, Jenna Coleman is confirmed to be leaving Doctor Who, and based on that episode, that’s good news- it’s not that she’s anywhere close to bad, just that the show doesn’t seem to know what to do with her at this point).

And sure, the episode dipped over into too silly a few times during it’s run (could have done without the Doctor playing electric guitar on a tank, to be honest), and part of me is worried that a season that opens with Missy and Davros is going to be constantly living in the shadow of it’s premiere, but The Magician’s Apprentice worked. It didn’t just go big for it’s opener, it went huge, giant, galaxy-engulfing, and that alone was dazzling enough to paper over any wobbly writing or underwritten Clara scenes. The episode ends on a incongruently dark note, as the Doctor points a Dalek weapon at the boy Davros, reminding us that this isn’t just harmless teatime fodder, and I celebrate the fact that Doctor Who is back, really back, after what feels like years without it in full force.

Still, this better be the last of the Daleks we see this season. I’ll have you yet, Moffat.

Ugh, so anyone who knows me or reads this blog will know that I have some powerfully mixed feelings towards The Walking Dead. It’s got a great first few seasons, no doubt, and some strong characters with a couple of standout performances. But the last couple of seasons have been kind of a hot mess, scrambling up motivations and character consistency to make room for hackneyed development of characters who reached their full potential three years ago and really need to die now. But it seems like all my close friends LOVE the show, so I have to sit there biting my lip whenever it comes up for fear of screaming “IT HASN’T MADE A LICK OF SENSE IN THE LAST TWO YEARS GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!” in their faces. I’m not so good at keeping friends, as you can probably guess.

Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis, being too damn good for this show.

But anyway, I’ll admit that I was pretty excited when I heard about Fear the Walking Dead (the show, by the way, should obviously have been called The Rambling Deceased, but that’s neither here nor there), because I’m a horror fan and I like shows and movies that have the balls to go through with showing the actual apocolypse, as opposed to shifting straight into full zombie mode, via the Zombie Coma trope (hello, 28 Days Later). Also, it had Kim Dickens in it, and she’s a bloody excellent actress, and the show’s mothership had done pretty well with giving it’s female characters at least a modicum of development that didn’t revolve around them getting raped every other episode. And then I saw the premiere of Fear the Walking Dead., and all my hope was shattered.

It was almost masterful in it’s badness- how could a show with this much budget, this much talent, and this much hype be so terrible? I hooted my way through lines like “What does that make me?” “…..human”, watched through my fingers as they butchered whatever character Kim Dickens might have had buried in this mess, and  seemed to throw their fingers up at anyone who thought they might not smash through their black male cast with a machete like they had on The Walking Dead. I wanted to look away from the screen to save the people who’d made it the embarrassment of knowing someone had actually seen it. I mean, I thought it was pretty hilarious, but maybe that was just because I’m a braying television snob who can’t disengage critical brain during anything. Other people around me liked it, so I grudgingly carried on with the next couple of episodes.

And they were…better. Not amazing, not ground-breaking, but tight, well-acted, reasonably compelling TV that managed to introduce nuanced conflicts amongst the breakdown of society. It was like night and day, and it took me a while to figure out precisely why that was. I think I’ve narrowed it down to a few points, however, so stick with me, and we can try and figure out how one of the most stormingly dissapointing openings I’d ever seen has evolved into a tense zombie drama.

I’ll tell you the first thing that was wrong with that first episode for free: Frank Dillane.

Oh, whoops, no, that’s Captain Jack Sparrow, although you could be forgiven for thinking that Dillane’s bizarrely affected performance as a junkie caught in the first stages of the outbreak was an homage to Depp’s iconic pirate. He swaggers around wearing outrageous clothes, taking substances and spouting nonsense, which sounds great until you realize that the show is playing this deadly straight and they expect you to take Dillane’s wavering accent and unwatchably bad attempts at emoting seriously.

A poor man’s Johnny Depp or a rich man’s James Franco? You decide.

Setting your whole first episode- especially one that clocked in at a saggy hour in length- around this performance was a catastrophe of a mistake. Dillane makes sense as an occasionally snippy, occasionally endearing supporting character, as he’s been pitched as in the last two episodes, but front and centre he’s a disaster, especially when you have actors like Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis listed in your main cast. Look, I know I’m really beating this over the head, but here’s an interview with him where he says that he doesn’t know what acting is. This is a travesty on par with Hayden Christensen being cast as Anakin Skywalker- so many young actors would have killed for that role, and they gave it to this guy? Grumble, grumble.

Anyway, as I said, moving the focus from him to Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis is wise. As a pair of single parents trying to protect their families as chaos breaks out on the streets of LA, they put in a pair of sharp, direct performances that undercut the show’s occasionally schmaltzy family vibe. While the pacing was still wobbly, the script had cottoned on to the scariest part of the outbreak being the utter breakdown of society, and exploited that with lots of budget-blowing riot sequences. It felt like the first episode was groping about for some of The Walking Dead’s gruesome, sprawling, thematically heavy-handed glory, but the second two seemed to settle into their own pace of character-focused, smaller-stakes drama that works a lot better for them. I noticed that Robert Kirkman, the man behind both this series and The Walking Dead, wrote the first episode, so maybe it makes sense that it felt like such a poor shadow of it’s originator. He’s writing the finale, too, so I might have to blog about that if it’s as impressively bad as the premiere.

Oh, fuck, yeah, there’s a sister in it as well, but she’s so unbelievably underwritten I have nothing to say about her.

So, do I actually recommend this show? Yeah, go on then. Much of The Walking Dead, at least for the last couple of seasons, has been a half-hate-watching experience at best, so I didn’t expect a huge amount from a spin-off. But Fear the Walking Dead has something to it- maybe it’s the more family-focused story that seems to give the drama higher stakes, maybe it’s the fact that we’re being dragged along on what is a disorientating and well-articulated cavalcade of horror. Whatever it is, I’ll be tuning in next week, and you should consider doing so too.