Tom Salinsky

Wow, that came around fast. It seems only yesterday that I was pondering the impact of incel #1 Alan in The Robot Revolution and now already we’re gunning for the season finale, which features the return of incel #2 Conrad. As usual, it’s hard to judge the effectiveness of the story as a whole when we only have the first half to consider, and last year I was blown away by episode seven and felt episode eight didn’t quite live up to it. This time, I’m not quite so blown away by episode seven, but I feel as if the pieces are in place for what could be a terrific conclusion to what has been quite a strong season.

Rather than spend an entire episode having the Doctor desperately trying to prevent Rani #1 and Rani #2 from putting their evil plan into action, rather thrillingly we begin with the plan having almost completely succeeded. And it’s a slightly odd one, although the explanations are there if you listen carefully (or put the subtitles on). Omega can only be freed by cracking open the planet and that means constructing an obviously fake world which the inhabitants can then start doubting. This gives everybody the chance to play different versions of their familiar characters, which is always fun. So we have Ncuti and Varada as Mr and Mrs Smith, Jemma Redgrave as his clockwatching boss and even UNIT HQ is cos-playing as the Masque of Mandragora TARDIS.

Meanwhile, although Jonah Hauer-King still seems to me like a space where a person should be, and Bonnie Langford gets little to do as Mel, Archie Panjabi and Anita Dobson are having the absolute time of their lives, job-sharing the role of the Rani and Jonathan Groff, Susan Twist and Carole Ann Ford are along for the ride too. The gag of identical yellow mugs that slip through tables is deliciously odd, and the parable about the disabled is nicely handled. But there are an awful lot of unanswered questions at this stage: why is Omega underneath our planet? Will his reappearance be yet more jeopardy-via-surname or will his role make sense given his history and be understandable by new viewers? What is Space Baby Poppy doing there? And – as usual – just how will the Doctor get out of that one.

This all looks amazing – director Alex Sanjiv Pillai does lovely work and the set design is gorgeous – so I was very happy while it was on. My only doubts are about next week…

Stakes are funny things. On the surface, the idea seems obvious. Two people amusing themselves predicting the outcome of a coin flip is dull. Two people betting fifty quid on the outcome of a coin flip is a bit more interesting. Two people betting their life savings on the outcome of a coin flip is fascinating. Two people flipping a coin for their actual life is horrifying and compelling. But it doesn’t always work like that. Consider how many stormtroopers get mown down or blown up over the course of any given Star Wars film. And yet when Luke Skywalker fills in a gap in his family tree, or loses a hand for all of ten minutes of screen time, it seems to matter far more. Stormtroopers are anonymous. Luke is someone we care about and that makes all the difference.

So it almost doesn’t matter whether ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand spectators get sucked out into space, just as it almost doesn’t matter when a hundred or a million or a billion or a trillion viewers stand to get whammied when Kid does the thing with the whatsit. They’re all anonymous. But – hang on! The Doctor is one of those sucked out into space too. That raises the stakes, right? Actually, it kinda lowers them. If this is happening to the Doctor, then it must be survivable – and if it’s survivable, that lowers the stakes again.

Now, this is a problem in any adventure story all of the time (you can only do the ending of No Time to Die once per hero) so the trick is to play these events with conviction and brio, and try to engage our emotions and stop us from thinking too hard. And that’s why I enjoyed this episode so much. The shot of all of those bodies being drawn up into space is an astonishing one and the solution is far from obvious. Nor does the explanation of how they survived make any kind of scientific sense, but it is properly executed in terms of structure, because we saw the Doctor fiddle with the thingamajig before the roof blew off.

I’m a bit less interested in the viewers at home to be honest, but the plot requires that Winn and Kid (named after their fathers perhaps?) are in the process of doing an awful thing and need to be stopped, and this all went off very smoothly. The evocation of the contest is brilliantly done, on paper and on screen. The contemporary references to Rylan and Graham Norton don’t grate too badly, the songs are amazing, the aliens look fab and the backstage shenanigans with Mike and Gary and Belinda and Cora are all well-handled. Well, maybe Belinda is stuck in her own sideplot which goes nowhere, and maybe Susan steals her thunder a bit, but I admired how elegantly the political backstory was sketched in, and I loved seeing this Doctor completely lose it.

The pacing is good as well. This is a nice simple story, which starts strong and still manages to build to a climax, leaving enough time for the various bits of plot admin to be dealt with without it feeling like the episode reaches the end and keeps going. The huge number of people who need to be individually rescued is a bit of a problem, but once again this is recognised and papered over with shots of whole groups being retrieved and revived.

And Mrs Flood is the Rani. I’m not a huge fan of this reveal, to be honest. It’s a bit thrill-by-surname, like Benedict Cumberbatch revealing himself as Khan in Star Trek Into Dullness. The Rani wasn’t a brilliant character in Mark, was a frankly terrible character in Time, and although Archie Panjabi is great, it was only Kate O’Mara who made it watchable at all. Still, I’m not going to prejudge, but as a cliffhanger ending, it had nothing like the power of the return of Sutekh – a return which crucially didn’t require viewers to have seen Pyramids of Mars to understand what was going on.

This is probably worth four stars, given the solid construction, while also taking into account the slight overreaching and the sidelining of Belinda. But I had such a good time watching it, I’m going to bump it up another half. A strong year so far, making me very hopeful indeed for the season finale.

This is clearly the film of the summer which is tearing through the box office faster and more ferociously than a gang of redneck vampires through a juke joint. I saw it and loved it, but I was also careful to learn as little about it as possible in order that it could give up its secrets as it saw fit. I’ve since seen the spoilerific trailers, and I’d urge anyone reading this who hasn’t seen Sinners to avoid them too, stop reading and go and see Sinners, because it’s terrific.

This is the second of two legends-of-acting-playing-two-roles movies out this month, but here it feels like it makes rather more sense than de Niro showing he can do hat-on and hat-off acting in the same film. Smoke and Stack are two different sides of the same coin, plus – who else you gonna get to go toe-to-toe with Michael B Jordan if not Michael B Jordan? The effects work is exemplary, although I wasn’t so knocked out by the cigarette switch in the opening, but the climactic fight is absolutely flawless, and in the dialogue scenes, I simply forget they were both the same actor after a while.

The rest of the cast is top notch too, from seasoned campaigners like Delroy Lindo, to up-and-comers like Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell and Wunmi Mosaku, to complete noobs like the revelatory Miles Canton.

About the only thing which anyone seems to complain about is the pacing, but everyone has a different niggle, so this is evidently a matter of taste more than anything else. For what it’s worth, here’s my take. The opening narration is delicious, and the opening in-media-res-wait-one-day-earlier while shopworn works well to promise the scares that are coming. I adored the material surrounding the brothers putting their venue together and didn’t feel for a minute that I was being made to wait too long for the gore fest, but the intro to Jack O’Connell felt misplaced. I gather this was originally planned to open the film, but director Ryan Coogler felt the audience would be waiting for him to reappear and not be paying attention. He might be right, but the new position for this short sequence feels arbitrary and clunky. Compare that to the elegant way in which the bravura and astonishingly bold music-through-time-lifts-the-roof sequence gives way to the arrival of the bloodsucking trio. Here everything feels purposeful, carefully weighted and hugely effective.

As reality dawns on our gang and they break up the party, they’re made to confront the consequences of their choices, and this again is beautifully paced, but this movie which so luxuriated in its set-ups rushes its pay-offs ever-so-slightly with the climactic battle in the eaves of the bar feeling almost perfunctory. Do stay for the closing credits though if you want to know how the story really ends.

To be clear, these are minor quibbles, with what overall is a hugely exciting, deeply involving, transcendently musical, incredibly confident piece of filmmaking, packing luminous performances, suitably gory effects, razor sharp editing and gorgeous cinematography. What really makes it work though is how the themes of good, evil, temptation, history, hatred, trust, religion, sex, money and death are woven through the rich characters to create a deeply layered, profoundly moving and intricately constructed story. Not bad for a vampire flick by a Marvel director.

This is a tough one for me. Lots to enjoy. A fresh location, both macro (Lagos) and micro (barbershop). Some amazing guest actors. The regulars on top form. Unexpected continuity nods. And a very appealing Neil Gaiman-like fantasy atmosphere – thankfully achieved without actual Neil Gaiman. But counterbalancing this are some odd choices, a lack of coherence and the fact that there probably wasn’t quite enough plot for the running time.

Let’s start with Lagos. Despite all being summoned up in the Cardiff studios, this looked and sounded amazing and was completely convincing. And the Doctor’s explanation as to why he was drawn back to this place was very sweet and rather heartfelt – as is his surprise at hearing Belinda empathise completely with his plight. This most human and open of all Doctors needs friends and has learned that these are a little harder come by in some quarters than they were when he looked like a flamboyant cabinet minister.

Ariyon Bakare is mesmerising as the Barber and Michelle Asante is luminous as his troubled sidekick Abby/Abena. But not nearly enough was done with the other inhabitants of the barbershop to properly differentiate them. This is a common problem and the gulf between the instantly distinguishable crew of the Sanctuary Base and the impossible-to-keep-straight Flesh Gangers is a wide one – to pick two examples which stand out to me. Here, writer Inua Ellams only seems interested in the Barber and maybe old Omo, but none of the others.

Getting Belinda into the story is tough, and when she isn’t available, the Doctor has to play the role of blundering naif, yanking open the door of the shop when surely his Spidey-sense – or just his common sense – should have told him to exercise a bit of caution. There follows – if I’m honest – quite a lot of that Steven Moffat standby: people standing around urgently. This is livened up briefly by a glimpse of Jo Martin (presumably in Abby’s memory, not the Doctor’s) which is good fun, as is the equally brief appearance of Captain Poppy from Space Babies – and the requisite Angie Watts cameo.

Then after all of this narrative vamping, the resolution feels rushed, with the braided-hair-map barely being needed and set up only seconds before being paid off. And the climax didn’t really feel like it meant anything. So, none of this was bad exactly, and all of the good points still stand. And its lyrical style means it can get away with more plot holes than Lucky Day, which is fortunate. I just didn’t feel much while watching it, and I really think I was supposed to.

This seems to have gone down well with fandom at large. For once, a story with a strong message isn’t being pilloried for being “woke garbage” or tarred with similarly meaningless epithets. That’s rather heartening. And once again it’s great to see the breadth that the series is capable of, as we leap from literal animated fantasy to flesh-creeping science-fiction terror to domestic UNIT-based psycho-drama.

But to me, this all felt a bit “will this do?” And it pains me to say that because I know how much hard work goes into making any television, let alone something as ambitious as Doctor Who. The pitch isn’t bad. Catching up with an ex-companion and seeing UNIT and its fight against alien invaders through the lens of the manosphere/online trolls/misinformation warriors/conspiracy theorists/delete as applicable. Sure, I’ll watch that. However, the execution seemed to me to be consistently lacking.

Millie and Conrad’s ghastly flirting is relentlessly generic, yet the bland lines in the script might have worked if Jonah Hauer-King had found something distinctive to do with the part, but he (like everyone else) is just settling into familiar grooves. Such a disappointment after McTighe’s thrillingly original Kablam! and his amazing work on the Blu-ray range. And following an episode which did “something nasty hiding in the shadows” so brilliantly, this time the men in rubber suits look like that and only like that, whether that’s what they’re supposed to be or not. What last week’s director did seemingly effortlessly has left this week’s flailing. Do you know how rare it is for me to find myself criticising writing, directing and acting on new Who?

Of course, this is the season’s double-banked episode, with no Varada Sethu and barely featuring Ncuti Gatwa, which does make life harder. But sometimes that makes everyone else up their game, and we get classics like Blink or Midnight or Turn Left or 73 Yards. Here alas, the lack of Doctor is keenly felt. And, now I’m distracted by how familiar this feels – bits and pieces of Blink (the glimpse of the Doctor on another adventure), Love & Monsters (fan’s eye view of the Doctor), A Christmas Carol (the Doctor’s chance encounter with young Conrad), 73 Yards (Millie Gibson telling everyone in a scary pub to listen to her) and so on.

And crucially, the big switcheroo doesn’t really work at all. Either Conrad is a very well-known anti-UNIT, anti-alien podcaster with a large and loyal following and therefore everybody knows who he is and what he stands for, OR he’s the kind of podcaster which Ruby Sunday would happily go and talk to. But not, as this story needs him to be – both at once.

And just why does actually seeing real aliens and a disappearing police box make him a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic instead of, as would seem to make rather more sense, a true believer? Why does he think that making his own fake aliens will convince the world that other aliens are also fake? If I showed you fake potatoes, would you stop believing in potatoes? And why doesn’t he take the damned antidote – other than to make the plot work? Then again, he’s the kind of conspiracy theorist whose bonkers claim is that UFOs aren’t real, so maybe I shouldn’t expect logic from him. But worse, there’s no complexity to him either, no hint that he is in any way conflicted over his treatment of Ruby. We’re right back in Chibnall-land, where subtext is forbidden and everybody has a single dimension and just says what’s on their mind as directly as possible.

Look, there’s good stuff here. Millie is great, as usual. I adored her in the pub bluntly telling the old git who dared question her authority “Go and get some fresh air, big man, see what happens.” Yes, mate. It’s always a pleasure to see Jemma Redgrave, Alexander Devrient and Ruth Madelely. And the Vlinkx, was… also there. The UNIT traitor, though, isn’t so much hiding in plain sight as sticking out like a sore thumb, forefinger and big toe. Sure, I can get behind the message. I agree: Internet trolling equals bad. But to me this all felt a bit reheated, and a bit half-hearted. And I don’t think I really like the idea that if you meet the Doctor as an impressionable child, there’s even a chance that this interaction will turn you into a cartoon villain like Conrad. The Doctor is responsible for our current toxic online culture? Really? I don’t want that even hinted at. Damn.