The Cutprice Guignol

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.

Obvious trigger warning for self-harm here.

So, a few months ago, I was at the Doctor’s (not that doctor, you fool, the other kind). And I was feeling like shit for reasons I honestly can’t really remember any more-everything in my life was trotting along at a good old clip, but I still desperately wanted to harm myself and I couldn’t figure out why. While in my slightly twisted opinion, there was nothing wrong with that and I should just sit on the floor listening to shitty mid-noughties pop-punk and get it over with, I knew (and still know) that when I cut myself it hurts some of the people I love the most, so I traipsed into the doctor’s, looking to talk over some of the horrible things going through my head and hopefully find some way to start tackling them. I was in and out of the appointment in ten minutes, after the doctor had referred to my “illness-inverted commas…” and handed me over the card for a website which had some helpful hints for people struggling with depression, which is not a problem I’d come to her with. She made some noises about putting me back on anti-depressants, and off I vanished back into the real world again, no better off than when I came in, but a little disgruntled at another pointless encounter about my self-harm from a person who didn’t really seem to want to listen to what I had to say about my own experiences.

Look, I know that some people who suffer from mental health problems refuse to get help from the medical profession, and if that’s their way of dealing with it, bully for them, I’m not going to try and take that away. But me? For the last two years, I’ve been about as keen as I can be in fixing what’s wrong with my brain in whatever way I can- give me pills, give me therapy, give me anything you think might make me not a little bit scary when I’m on a viscous downer. While I’ve mostly managed to get a handle on my depression and anxiety, self-harm hangs out at the back of my head like a bad dream you kind of half-remember, until suddenly it’s the only thing I can think about for two weeks straight and enter into an endless roundabout dialogue with myself about why I should do it, but then I shouldn’t do it, but then it’s my body and no-one else has any say over it, but then…and on and on and on and on. I’ve been pointed towards a bunch of ways to deal with these problems in the past, and what I’ve gleaned from a lot of these coping methods is that it’s okay to what to hurt yourself, provided you don’t inflict the results on anyone else.

If you’ve been on any self-harm advice sites in the last few years, you’ll come across a variety of tips and tricks to keep yourself from harm. Example: wrapping a rubber band around your wrist and snapping it against your skin until the urge to cut yourself goes away, or pushing your arms into a bucket of ice to fulfill the urge to feel pain on your body. Now, I get why both of these would be useful if you were just trying to kick an addiction to a specific kind of self-harm, but for me- and a bunch of people I’ve connected with, online and in real life, about these issues- it’s not about cutting, or burning, or whatever your poison of choice may be (literally poison, sometimes, but I digress). It’s about the pain aspect of it all. I might be a cutter first and foremost (ugh, such a 2006-MCR-fan word), but I will hit things until my hands bruise, scratch until I draw blood, push earrings into my fingertips, because the sensation of the pain gives me relief from feeling angry/upset/frustrated/scared/whatever. A lot of the coping methods advised are not to wean you off using physical pain to salve yourself, and that seems kind of counter-intuitive, a way for people around you to not have to deal with the physical aftermath of what you’ve done while you’re still engaging in destructive behaviour.

And, of course, I only speak for myself here, but my experience with doctors and self-harm has been pretty atrocious across the board. Most have put it down to depression or anxiety, even when I try to explain that no, that’s really, really not what this is and could I please not go back on anti-depressants when the furthest thing from what I’m actually feeling is depressed?

In the chats I’ve had with other people who engage in self-injurious behaviour (would it be too crass to refer to them as my SIBlings? It would. Glad I got that out), one thing has become evidently clear: there is no one reason behind it. It’s simplified in after-school specials as something done for control, or to express an emotion, or to feel less numb, but those are only a tiny sliver of the reasons why people like me do it. I understand why people look for common factors amongst those who self-harm, because it makes the problem easier to treat and understand, but it’s not that easy, as much as I would love it to be. I would love-love-for there to be a pill that made all of it go away, but there’s not. Because sometimes self-harm is a symptom of other problems, and sometimes it’s the problem in itself, sometimes it’s an experiment, sometimes an addiction. Whenever we try and simplify it- by offering one-size-fits-all solutions to the problem, or by not listening to a sufferer’s own personal experiences-we’re skipping out on a chance to address the real issue at the heart of the problem, whatever that may be. Mental health problems are still sitgmatized, and self-harm, as one of the most visible forms of a mental health problem, is not exempt from that list. So we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it a whole bunch, because, judging by most of the resources I’ve encountered over the years, it seems like we don’t have a fucking clue what we’re talking about.

What had been your experiences with self-harm? Is there anywhere you’ve found advice you’d want to share with other sufferers?

Look, I know why this episode exists. I get it. I do. It’s here to break up some of the intense, emotional, high-stakes drama that surrounds it- what, you’d have been happy with the survivor’s guilt and rampaging murder robot of Dalek followed on with the heart-wrenching, gut-punching emotion of Father’s Day? What kind of monster are you? Well, certainly not the Jagrafess, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Just like every week, read another take on the episode over at Red Whine. 

So yes, I understand why The Long Game falls where it does in the series, being one of the lighter, more straightforward romps of the series. It’s also the biggest wobble of the season so far, an episode that never seems quite sure of itself, lurching between body modification horror and campy Simon Pegg without much room in between. But still, this IS the best season of the rebooted Doctor Who (side note: here’s an article I wrote for one of my favourite sites to contribute to about my most-watched episodes of the original run of Doctor Who, for those who seem unable to grasp the concept that WE’RE ONLY RECAPPING THE REBOOT, COME ON NOW), and even it’s weakest episode has a lot to recommend to it.

Well, maybe not a lot, but The Long Game serves at least one important purpose, and that’s laying a lot of ground work for the finale two-parter, and, looking back, it feels more like something they threw in at the last minute to break up the heavier episode and get ahead on the exposition for the very excellent two-parter that ends this series. It just feels kind of bitty, everything from the one-episode companionship of the agonisingly dull and irritating Adam from the last episode to a handful of interesting ideas that seem to trail off into nothingness, like the awesome data cores implanted into people’s brains to allow them to absorb centuries of information in a moment. Christ, I haven’t even got on to the story yet: the Doctor, Rose, and Adam wind up on Satellite Five, a broadcast news station that provides coverage for the human empire (which is a cool concept that I’d love to see more of, because I am a history nerd and nothing you can do or say will ever change that), but it soon becomes clear that something distinctly non-human and rather Jagrafess-like (and something with distinctly dated CGI effects, but let’s not dwell on that) is the one actually running the show.

I wrote a lot last season about how Clara and Capaldi’s Doctor are a million times better as characters when they’re not together, and here it’s kind of the other way around. Rose and this Doctor require someone to bounce off of, someone with real screen presence and camaraderie – someone we’re getting to soon, I promise.

And splitting them up for much of this episode to have them run around with half-sketched in secondary characters was a mistake. But still, at least we get some top-quality Simon Pegg action, as he swans around with icicles dripping off his beard as The Editor, as he just about pulls the episode back from eye-rollingly forgettable. I’ll always dig a good, bureaucratic villain, the kind of person who hides their nastiness behind buttoned-up suits and unnaturally neat hairstyles, and Simon Pegg’s Editor is definitely one of the most entertaining iterations of the trope.

And, as I said earlier, there are a handful of tantalisingly good sci-fi ideas kicking around in the sidelines of this episode, including Annoying Adam’s lust for knowledge and the growing influence of the news media in controlling the populace, even if they do kind of get sidelined so the Doc can shout at a pile of that slimy play-goo you could order out of the back of the Beano when I were a lass.

Look, I know I’m not coming across as too enthusiastic here, but this episode is still worlds better than some of the stuff we’ve seen in the last few years of Who- it’s got something to say, an original villain, some fun cameos (OH HELLO TAMSIN GRIEG, LOVE OF MY LIFE), and a fun twist ending that I will spoil for no-one. It just has the bad luck of being trapped in an amazing run of episodes. But, taken as a singular being and not as part of the whole series, this is for sure one of the more inanely entertaining episodes since the show’s reboot, And inanely entertaining, as we all know, is my middle name.

Next week, we’ll be reviewing the heart-shattering Father’s Day through a haze of tears, before we switch over to covering season nine week-to-week. Join us, bring tissues (and not just because Jackie’s in the next episode).

*hums theme song*