Tom Salinsky

The Oscar race has begun and here are some films I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, any of which might find themselves covered in glory (or slathered in humiliation) early next year.

Jay Kelly

Noah Baumbach’s meditation on the nature of stardom should be celebrated simply for giving George Clooney another leading role. It feels like forever since we saw him at the centre of a real movie. I think the last time I saw him on the big screen was in Hail Caesar, nearly ten years ago. There as here, he plays an old-fashioned movie star, but this time he’s in the modern world. There’s an obvious meta-layer here as Clooney is one of the last of the old-school male movie stars (along with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt?). He grins and smarms his way through this fairly slender tale of privileged heartache, but Baumbach (who wrote it with Emily Mortimer) has such a light touch with the material, that it’s easy to enjoy and to empathise with Kelly, even as he descends into self-indulgent misery. There are echoes of Preston Sturges here, as Kelly’s personal mission to connect with his offspring requires the participation of a huge entourage. But in a welcome touch of bitterness, his team gradually peels away as one-by-one they realise that he isn’t worth it. A restrained Adam Sandler is good value as his loyal manager, but it’s worth watching just for the scene on a train where Clooney’s real-life starpower melds with Jay Kelly’s backstory to create real joyful magic.

After the Hunt

I think I don’t quite get Luca Guadanigno. I liked Call Me By Your Name well enough, but I wouldn’t have piled acclaim on it the way that many people did. I was totally unprepared for the bonkers shooting style and soapy excesses of Challengers but I did enjoy it. And I appreciated After the Hunt more than many critics (so again I’m out of step), although I agree that the ending is maddeningly coy, and I have no idea what Michael Stuhlbarg thought he was doing – and he’s one of my favourite actors. If you can get past some of the sloppy plotting, and the lacunae posing as ambiguity, I honestly think there’s much to savour here. Chiefly the performances: Ayo Edebiri as heartfelt as ever, Andrew Garfield as good as I’ve ever seen him, and Julia Roberts (one of the last of the old school female movie stars) just fantastically good as the deeply conflicted philosophy professor. But it’s hard to know what to do with a film which clearly wants to confront issues of power abuse and sexual misconduct, but just not enough to actually depict either.

Wicked For Good

As an enormous fan of The Wizard of Oz, I sat down to watch Wicked the musical on stage with some trepidation. But I needn’t have worried, the show is amazing with soaring ballads, some neat commentary on the nature of propaganda, and wonderful staging. I saw it twice. And John M Chu’s movie version of Act One was even better, taking time to articulate the emotional journeys of Galinda and Elphaba with far more texture and nuance than on stage.

What the hell happened to part two? Well, there are two related issues here. One is that whereas the first half of the story is allowed to unfold naturally and organically, with plot points arising out of character driven choices made by people whose motives we understand, the second half keeps banging its head on the need to tie up Wizard of Oz loose ends. There is very little reason for Elphaba to fake her death, to turn Fiyero into a man of straw, or for Galinda to keep up her various pretences. Time and again, what is supposed to feel like a puzzle piece elegantly slotting into place feels more like a square peg being beaten into a round hole with a pile driver.

And the result of this is the other issue – it becomes impossible to understand who the central characters are and why they’re acting in the ways they do. Quite why the first movie succeeds so well and the second fails so hard, whereas the stage show just seems to cruise through, is something for people with more expertise to answer. I’ll just note that the visuals are as sumptuous as ever, Jonathan Bailey again steals the film, and that Ariana Grande gets almost nothing to do. Oh, and all the best songs are in the first half, but you knew that.

Blue Moon

I remember William Goldman talking about how exciting it was to discover a piece of wonderful story material, such as the tale of Butch and Sundance. I can only imagine how thrilled Richard Linklater must have been to discover that the first show Richard Rodgers wrote after his split with Lorenz Hart was the blockbuster Oklahoma! There’s something so fascinating about the almost parasitical interdependence of a composer and lyricist, neither of whom can have a career without the other. Rodgers swapping Hart for Oscar Hammerstein would have been a hammer blow for better men, but Hart – at least in this version – is a preening, self-doubting, narcissistic, depressive, sexually frustrated, attention-seeking, fame-hungry, self-destructive manbaby. He’s essentially the Michael Scott of 1940s Broadway, which is obviously why tall good-looking Ethan Hawke has shaved his head and been magically shrunk by almost a foot to play the part.

This is one meta-aspect of the movie. Whereas George Clooney and Jay Kelly’s personas overlap so much it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, here part of the fun is seeing loose, confident, rangy Hawke reinvent himself as diminutive, needy Hart. It’s greatly to everyone’s credit that I did stop thinking about this eventually, but it took a while. And that’s partly because there’s nowhere to hide. Hart is in hell as he waits for the Oklahoma! gang to come over to Sardi’s after their triumphant press night, and the evening plays out in real time.

Another game viewers can play is Easter Egg hunting. A bit like in Saturday Night, of all the famous people Hart encountered, influenced, suggested ideas to or pissed off over the course of his entire life, every single one is now said to have happened in one evening. After the third or fourth such name-drop, my self-congratulatory pleasure in having clocked George Roy Hill or the genesis of Stuart Little, eventually gave way to a slight frustration at the artificiality of it all.

And that’s a shame, but only a minor one, as the psychological portraits here are incredible, with both Hart and Andrew Scott’s smooth Rodgers making a show of generosity, while both seethe with resentment on the inside. And while Margaret Qualley does excellent work, and even though it’s letters from and to her character which inspired Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, the long conversation with her in the coat-check room is the only time that the movie drags.

Bugonia

Lastly, let’s check off the latest Yorgos Lanthimos / Emma Stone / Jesse Plemons joint. A riff on a South Korean film from over twenty years ago, this takes a potent situation and keeps finding new ways to raise the stakes, until eventually it all detonates in an explosion of silliness. I’m not sure why but something tells me that if I’d been watching a film from South Korea, I might have been more willing to embrace the ending, but for much of its running time, I was very happy with the Misery-style situation I was presented with, and I do need to congratulate Will Tracy for his rigour as the rest of the film does not conflict with the rug-pull ending at all, as far as I can see, and that’s not easy. But overall this lacks both the awards-attracting weight of The Favourite and the pleasurable lightness of Poor Things or The Lobster.

My eye was caught by the new glossy Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch but I felt the need to watch the earlier versions first. The 1973 original  with Edward Fox is absolutely brilliant, with Fox’s icy charm perfectly evoking Frederick Forsyth’s meticulous assassin. Ranged against him is pretty much every British male character actor who graduated since the turn of the century, and a few European ones as well, notably Michael Lonsdale who’d go on to be one of James Bond’s most impressive opponents (albeit in a film which few people rate highly).

What’s especially fascinating about this version is how stripped down it is. Fox is going to bump off Charles de Gaulle. Lonsdale has to stop him. There are no subplots, there are no detours, and very notably nobody gets in Lonsdale’s way. He gets every scrap of support available to him, through official and unofficial channels, nobody tells him he’s “on thin ice”, or “he’s becoming obsessed” or he’s got “48 hours to wrap this thing up.” And even with that, he only just manages to stop Fox in time – Fox even manages to get a shot off but misses. So far from robbing us of tension, this lean, streamlined approach makes the Jackal seem like a far more formidable foe.

The plot was revisited in 1997 with Michael Caton-Jones behind the camera, replacing Fred Zinnemann, Bruce Willis slightly miscast as the Jackal and Richard Gere hopelessly miscast as ex-IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen. All the hysterical personal dramas I didn’t miss in 1973 are back here and this is pretty much all by-the-numbers nineties thriller cliches which would have gone straight to DVD if it hadn’t been for the star power of the cast. One famous scene in which Willis offs a young Jack Black is the only noteworthy thing. Forsyth hated it and it was just called “The Jackal” to acknowledge that this wasn’t really much to do with his novel.

And now we have a ten part series which moves the action to the present day, moves the target to a Musk style tech billionaire and greatly expands the narrative. Redmayne finds a deep seam of ruthlessness which is rather disturbing and Lynch – who I wasn’t convinced by in No Time to Die but who I thought was amazing in Matilda – is stunning as Bianca, by turns friend to the fallen, hard-bitten meeting room warrior, and bad ass machine gun toting bitch. Expanding such a slender storyline comes with risks, but the 1973 film exemplifies the motto “audiences love how” and the new team, led by showrunner Ronan Bennett have taken that to heart, with a whole other mission for the Jackal which is just as thrilling as the main hit, a subplot which digs into the Jackal’s own emotions without undermining his impact as a force for evil, and a surprisingly open-ended conclusion. Recommended.

Also coming at the tale end of a series of iterations of the same narrative comes Wicked Part One – the musical film of the stage musical of the novel inspired by the musical film of the novel. I adore the 1939 Judy Garland film and sat down to watch the musical with some trepidation, but I greatly appreciated the cleverness of the story as well as the soaring songs. Now Jon M Chu (In the Heights) has directed a movie version which takes about as long as the stage show without the interval to deliver just the first half of the story – but fuck me I’ve never had 160 minutes whip by so quickly.

All of the the things which are assumed to have taken place off-stage, all the gaps we the audience have to fill in between the songs, all the emotional beats which aren’t quite fully illuminated come into crisp sharp focus here, and those amazing songs land perfectly, thanks to the gorgeous staging, perfect pacing and astonishing lead performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. Shout out too to the hilarious Jonathan Bailey who has a damn good go at stealing a film which the two stars already have completely locked down.

And I just have time to mention that I’ve now finished watching the first series of Blake’s 7 thanks to the recently released Blu-ray box set. I have only vague memories of watching this when it was first on, chiefly involving Paul Darrow swaggering around in a slightly absurd fashion. In this first series, his calculating, self-centred Avon makes the perfect foil for Gareth Thomas’s passionate and idealistic Blake, and the best episodes combine wonderful character work with tight plotting and a real attempt to summon up a science fiction world. Yes, there is a lot of plastic and tinfoil in the sets and costumes, no not all the guest cast are up to snuff, but I was absolutely engrossed for all 13 episodes nevertheless.

TNG S06E02 Realm of Fear (). Poor Barclay should have kept his mouth shut. He figures out how to get the transporter to work through a technobabble interference cloud but then finds himself on the team having to take this “bumpy” ride over to a stricken ship and he scurries off the transporter pad. Before long, he’s confessing his transporterphobia to Troi and he seems almost eager to face his fears. And for the first time, we see transportation from the point of view of the transporter, with a nifty parallax effect on the sparkles. As usual, it’s gratifying to see that Barclay is largely believed when he babbles about creatures in the transport stream (no Michigan J Frog shenanigans here) and the final twist is very cool. Titles are back to normal, but Roddenberry no longer gets a mention in the closing credits (actually this was true of S06E01 as well).

TNG S06E03 Man of the People (). A remix of fairly familiar elements, from Oscar Wilde and from TNG episodes past. Ambassador Smoothie is the only person in the galaxy who can negotiate peace between the Zagbars and the Zoobles. A cranky older lady is on board, snarling at Troi over her marital future. Poor Marina Sirtis struggles to find any chemistry at all with Chip Lucia who presumably got his first name from being carved out of wood. Before long, Old Mother Cranky is dead and Chip Board is performing a hugely suspicious ritual with Troi who promptly turns into Counsellor Cougar. So as well as Troi-falls-in-love-with-the-wrong-dude we’re also going to get the oh-no-I’m-aging-to-death storyline, with a spoonful of the Sarek-needs-a-vessel-for-his-unwanted-emotions-plot, only this time more rapey. Marina Sirtis gets to show a bit more range than usual, but it’s not exactly progress to see her screaming for affection like an unruly child. Once again, sex proves to be the biggest blindspot for this creative team. Even Jeri Taylor, now a permanent fixture in the writers room, can’t stop this from feeling as if it was written by a gang of adolescent boys who haven’t had their first kiss yet. In a particularly absurd version of the Precise Countdown To Certain Doom, Troi can stay dead for exactly 30 minutes with zero ill-effects, but at one second past that time, she will be definitely deceased with no hope of recovery. Once the link with her is severed, her physical condition snaps back into place like a bungee cord too (which is the equivalent of putting out the fire burning your house down and seeing all of your possessions un-incinerate themselves). I’m also concerned for the young science officer that Evil Troi doled out that gleeful tough love to. Although, who knows – maybe it worked!

TNG S06E04 Relics (). Being largely familiar with the original crew only from the movies, watching all of TOS for the first time was an eye-opening experience, not least because both McCoy and Scotty get such short-shrift on the big screen. McCoy gets plenty of screen time, but he’s usually just someone for Kirk to talk to, rather than a person in his own right, and he never gets anything remotely resembling character development. And Scotty gets lumped in with all the others, generally getting four lines of purely functional dialogue and one moment of comic relief per movie. But in the original series, he’s possibly the most able and vital member of Kirk’s crew after Spock – perceptive, shrewd, level-headed, warm and of course an engineering genius. Here, something like that character is back and it’s a pleasure to see him, albeit now as somewhat of a gasbag. The gag of having him survive for decades in the transporter pattern buffer is very clever and it’s a complete delight to luxuriate in the nostalgia of this episode. Eventually of course, it turns out that he has something to learn from the 24th century and the 24th century has something to learn from him, but this never feels cloying or saccharine. I note that this episode edits out the movies too – the transporter effect and the Holodeck recreation of the bridge of the Enterprise are both 60s versions, not later.

TNG S06E05 Schisms (). The crew of the Enterprise is tackling a globular cluster, but there’s an ointment you can get which will clear that right up. Riker is having trouble sleeping, but Data has a cure: his poetry which is enough to put anyone out for the night. Meanwhile the sensors are on the fritz and other officers are starting to complain of similar symptoms. This one doesn’t cut very deep into any of our characters but it’s an engaging mystery, with a satisfyingly detailed solution and Jonathan Frakes is as watchable as ever. This is a high 3.5 but the spooky camerawork in the climax persuades me to round up rather than down. It’s also cool that we don’t get a complete solution to the mystery. It’s fun to think that there are still some strange new worlds out there…

TNG S06E06 True Q (). The Enterprise is saddled with an intern, but she’s of surprising interest to Q, who we haven’t seen in some time (not since the incredibly uninteresting Qpid in Season 4). Q is implacably opposed to the Protestant work-ethic which Crusher, Picard and co. are intent on instilling in young Amanda. Like a divorcing parent, Picard insists that he and Q display a united front in front of their charge. Immature characters with god-like powers is scarcely a new Star Trek concept but there’s an intriguing glimpse here into what it would actually be like to be suddenly granted them. On the other hand, Amanda’s mooning after Riker is exactly the same kind of adolescent view of sex and relationships which dogs all four Berman series.

The COVID-19/Novel Coronavirus worldwide pandemic has changed everything and everyone is finding their own way of coping.

I’m not sure to what end, but I thought I would put down a few observations about my own personal strategies – possibly as a marker to look back on next week, next month or next year.

In many ways, the stay indoors, socially isolate, talk to people mainly over the Internet lifestyle sounds a lot like my preferred way of living. But it turns out there’s an awfully big difference between a lifestyle chosen and a lifestyle enforced.

In the Before Times, my week was rather unstructured and quite unpredictable. Some days would see me up early, suit on, and meeting corporate clients or delivering workshops or seminars at banks, law firms, ad agencies or the like. Some days I would be meeting friends, talking about creative projects such as a new play, or being the public face of one of our podcasts. We maintain an office in Camden so some days I would be there, cranking through admin, talking to Gina or Alex or Ned about future plans, or meeting our bookkeeper or accountant. When I’m editing podcasts, I prefer to work from home. Some of these “edit days” are spent entirely in my dressing gown. Often, I end up working late and at weekends, so I’m rarely up early unless I need to be. I’m blessed with living only a 40-minute walk from the West End, so sometimes I’ll walk into town to see a movie.

I’ve learned that what I need to keep myself happy and rested – since I don’t get weekends off in any meaningful way – is one “snow day” per month. On this day I need never get dressed if I don’t feel like it, and spend most of my waking hours eating cheese and watching old movies / Doctor Who episodes. It’s preferable for all concerned if I’m alone in the house.

Suddenly, in the last two weeks, all of that has changed. And I’ve had to change with it. So I’ve made some deliberate choices about my schedule which may be the opposite of what you’ve done if you previously had a fairly strictly routined working life.

I’m setting my alarm for 8:30am every morning, and trying to do 20 minutes on the exercise bike each day, starting no later than 9:30am. Since I get most of my exercise from walking, and I won’t be doing as much of that, this seems like a sensible way to burn some calories, and not just spend the day in bed. Then, I shower, shave and dress. I rarely wear t-shirts in any case, so I’m typing this in a business shirt with cufflinks. If I’m not seeing people I don’t live with, I sometimes don’t shave for several days. That can’t happen anymore. With no access to a hairdresser either, that way madness lies. I’m not prepared to come out of hibernation looking like the wild man of Borneo. (Is that an okay thing to say?)

10:30am to 6:00pm are working hours – this includes editing podcasts, but it also includes all the other usual things: replying to emails, updating websites, financial planning, conference calls and so on. At 12:00pm on Monday and Friday, we have a regular company catch-up (there are five of us) so we can stay sane, stay connected, and plan together. At 6:00pm every weekday, Deborah is recording her Instagram Live series “The New Normal” so I can be on hand to help with that and when she’s up and running, I can sign off for the day.

I’m making a real effort to keep the flat tidy and stack the dishwasher and/or wash the dishes each night. We’re continuing to pay our cleaner – who used to come three times a week! – but she’s no longer visiting our home and cleaning it. Coming downstairs to a clean kitchen is a good and important start to the day. Going to the supermarket involved queueing outside for twenty minutes (standing 2m away from the person in front) but once inside, most items were available and most shelves looked well-stocked.

I suddenly have a very active virtual social life! I spent one evening with old university friends on Zoom, celebrated a friend’s birthday on House Party and I’m looking into whether it might be possible for my monthly poker game to go ahead virtually.

I’m trying to do as little work as possible in the evenings and at the weekend. Often, Monday’s Guilty Feminist has to be uploaded on a Sunday evening, and that’s fine, and we’re planning on recording an episode of Best Pick on Saturday. But last weekend I mainly spent watching Pixar’s Onward (very good) and Tiger King on Netflix (with friends on House Party for bants).

It’s just over one week in and this is working for me so far. I know I’m lucky. I have no kids I’m trying to home school, I have money in the bank (at least for now), I have a wonderful partner to go through this with me, a team of motivated and talented people working on our business and a pleasant home environment with fast Internet and three adorable cats. Many people around the country are far worse off than me, which is why I’ve also filled in the form to volunteer for the NHS Responders. I’ll let you know how that goes soon.

Stay safe. Stay indoors. Wash your hands.

Series 10 feels like an event for all sorts of reasons. Twelve years after the triumphant return of Doctor Who, we finally reach our tenth set of episodes, with Capaldi following the now-established pattern of lead actors doing three-seasons-over-four-years in the part. So, it’s the last set of episodes with Malcolm Tucker at the helm of the TARDIS, and it’s the last set of episodes with Steven Moffat at the reins behind the scenes.

And despite, or maybe because of that, the avowed intention for the first episode is to provide a new jumping-on point for new viewers, with the cheeky title given to the season opener making this even more obvious.

In keeping with his notion of the War Doctor being a Doctor we, the viewers, somehow missed in 1996-2005, Moffat allows that more time has passed since Christmas 2016 than was seen during The Return of Doctor Mysterio. So, while we’ve been away, the Time Lord has stopped his wandering, taken up residence as a university don, and taken to guarding a mysterious vault. Only Matt Lucas’s Nardole represents an explicit link to episodes past.

So we get the repeated pleasure of seeing the Doctor through fresh eyes, those eyes this time belonging to Pearl Mackie’s amazingly winning Bill. To be sure, the companion part is fast becoming one of BBC television’s plumb roles and the producers no doubt had their pick of fresh young British talent, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they have come up with an immensely charming and skilled performer here, who will brighten the TARDIS considerably for at least these twelve episodes (rumours are that incoming show-runner Chris Chibnall wants to cast his own companion as well as his own Doctor).

That’s despite the fact that the writing is by-and-large twisting itself into absurd pretzels to make her as appealing across the board as possible. After Billie Piper’s defiantly chavvy Rose and Catherine Tate’s abrasive Donna, the TARDIS was subsequently inhabited by the rather more middle class Karen Gillian and the very plummy Clara The Impossible Girl. Where to put Bill on the social spectrum? Her speech is highly articulate and yet her accent contains frequent glottal stops and rough edges. She’s serving chips, so she’s common, but she’s attending lectures so she’s upwardly mobile. She’s upper lower working middle class and it’s a testament largely to Mackie that she emerges as a person and not as a bundle of unrelated characteristics.

The story meanwhile is largely a remix of familiar elements, including such old favorites as the possessed body, the pool of alien goo, the remnants of alien visitors and – a peculiarly Moffat one this – the inconsequential tour of the universe. In the context of the episode, this last one works fine (it’s partly there to show Bill and therefore the new viewers what the TARDIS is capable of) but it’s symptomatic of a nasty habit of the outgoing head writer – taking gigantic ideas and treating them trivially. The TARDIS’s ability to flit across all of time and space is utterly remarkable. Any opponent which can match it point-for-point should be an absolutely colossal threat. But here it just gets talked to death as if it were barely even a problem. Still, nice to see the Movellans again.

Still as remixes go, this was well enough-paced and witty enough to keep me happy. It’s worth three-and-a-half stars, but I’ll give it four because it’s the season opener and I think the rules are a little different for first episodes – but I’ll need next week to considerably up the stakes.

Of course, next week has already been-and-gone and rather than taking the ground-work laid by The Pilot and building on it, Smile simply repeated achingly familiar tropes from Doctor Who and other series past, while committing many of the same rookie mistakes as Frank Cottrell Boyce’s previously limp offering.

Some writers just aren’t suited to Doctor Who. Now, I’m fine with people like Richard Curtis and Simon Nye being given the chance to try their hand because one of the advantages of the anthology nature of the series is that it can effectively reinvent itself every week if it chooses. But once someone has shat the bed as comprehensively as the writer of In The Forest of the Night then there’s simply no need to give them another go, regardless of how much the show-runner likes them personally, or how heavily-laden their awards shelf is.

To be fair, this isn’t quite as bad as the previous offering, but it’s pretty soggy, generic stuff, suffering from poor pacing, rotten characterisation, a lack of new ideas and stupid costumes. The earlier scenes with the colonists set up both the problem and its solution too clearly for the Doctor’s laborious discovery of the same to hold any interest at all. And it really doesn’t help that while Mina Anwar is remixing – of all classic era stories – The Happiness Patrol, she appears to be wearing a costume made out of bubble wrap. For a moment I thought I was watching a Victoria Wood or French and Saunders spoof of the unloved and under-budgeted 80s programme, with ludicrous technobabble and silly plastic robots, not the BBC’s now much-feted and well-loved flagship family export.

Then the script can’t make up its mind whether there are colonists here or not. Instead of the Doctor arriving in time to save the last remaining embattled survivors, when he and Bill show up, the place is deserted. Now it can be argued that deserted corridors are spookier or more atmospheric, but it makes it much harder to establish a world, or a society when there are no other people around. Either way, it’s undeniably cheaper to do it this way, and that’s what these early scenes looked like – done on the cheap.

The Doctor first deduces that the colonists are on-their-way, then that the advance guard has already been killed, then that the colonists are here but in suspended animation – and then he decides to wake them up first and solve the lethal problem later. That’s after he’s decided not to blow the place up of course – a spectacularly stupid and reckless plan for the world’s smartest man, which sits very poorly with the overall morality of the series. The sense of a script desperately spinning its wheels isn’t helped by the Doctor repeatedly trying and failing to leave Bill behind, which is fair enough as the story would have unfolded in exactly the same way if she’d never set foot in the TARDIS at all.

And as well as being over-familiar, the central idea doesn’t really makes sense either – in two different ways. The silly plastic robots (hereafter referred to as SPRs) are so keen to make the humans happy that they murder anyone who is miserable. Surely this is a glitch which a) can be corrected by their human masters who – as the teaser makes perfectly clear – know precisely why the robots are killing them all; and b) which could have been found during early field trials and corrected then?

But let’s not forget that the whole complex, including the SPRs, has actually been constructed from swarms of nano-bots. This tedious science-fiction cliché seems to be everywhere at the moment, from Disney’s Big Hero Six, to this week’s episode of Supergirl, to – let’s not forget – Doctor Who’s own The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. The nano-bots can construct anything – walls, floors, ceilings, kitchens. So, why do they need SPRs at all? What can a SPR possibly do that that nano-bots couldn’t do far more easily and conveniently without assuming that clumsy form?

And when the generic band of colonists are inexplicably defrosted at the least convenient time, not one of them can summon up an ounce of characterization or interest. Instead, the Doctor actually literally pushes the reset button to solve the problem.

This is very, very thin stuff, which fails to play to any of its writer’s strengths, gives two brilliant lead actors almost nothing to do and fails to add anything at all to the body of Doctor Who ideas. I can only assume it was commissioned a very long time ago, before Nardole was added to the TARDIS crew, because the solution to the problem of how you stop Matt Lucas being so annoying was solved this time by leaving him behind. A better solution might be to give his character an actual stake in the narrative.

So, far from my favorite, but not quite as suffocatingly poor as Forest. I’ll scrape together two stars for it, and then knock half a star off again for this being yet another Automated System Gone Awry. It even looks like The Girl Who Waited. Was it shot in the same location?

Next week, we complete the new companion trifecta of Earth-bound adventure, far future space fantasy, and creepy historical. Hopefully, these two episodes represent a slightly wobbly take-off and not a fatal collapse of the whole infra-structure.

Let’s have another talk about formal constraints. In my review of Sleep No Bore, I referred to the handful of classic series episodes featuring only the regular cast. I could also have mentioned episode one of The Ark in Space or even episode one of The Space Museum. At this moment of course, the regular cast is only Peter Capaldi, so also relevant to this week’s episode is The Deadly Assassin. Tom Baker had “inherited” Lis Sladen but by the time she had decided to go, he was supremely confident in the role and had begun to wonder whether his next companion could be something other than a spunky young girl (most sources say he suggested a talking cabbage among other notions). Or whether in fact he needed a companion at all. Yes, of course you do, argued producer Philip Hinchcliffe, with one eye on the door marked “Exit” and to prove the point, commissioned a story with no companion. Unfortunately, he asked Robert Holmes to write it who was absolutely at the peak of his powers, and the story which resulted (although hated at the time for its revisionist attitude towards established continuity) is now seen as a stone cold classic. We will return to the subject of how to depict Gallifrey next time…

However, 45 minutes with only one actor (depending on how you count) is hard enough if the goal is something like Alan Bennet’s Talking Heads, but to attempt the same thing in an action-adventure-sci-fi drama is little short of insanity. But Steven Moffat can never be faulted for lacking ambition, and is hugely interested himself in structural devices and formal games, so this is another intricate puzzle box of a script.

Let’s have a talk about those. The potential drawbacks of puzzle box stories are two-fold. Firstly, they are very hard to pull off. Like a good joke, their purpose is to guide you towards a moment of insight where various elements of the narrative suddenly coalesce. If you fumble that moment of insight (either because the resolution is very easy to see coming or because it’s just complete gibberish, or both as in The Wedding of River Song) then the whole construction of your story starts to collapse. But even if you do pull this off, there’s the danger that the experience is rather an empty one, because the need to preserve the twist has distorted the story in so many other areas, and there isn’t room for any emotional catharsis or the usual thrilling-escape-from-death stuff. Blink is the perfect example of the form, and as this blog has previously noted, rather a millstone around the show-runner’s neck.

Returning director Rachel Talaly certainly makes the most of the visual storytelling which the script requires of her. The shots of the castle stranded out at sea, and the underwater material are particularly striking (even if I’m absolutely sure that Capaldi never even got his hair wet). And if the Veil is a bit of a standard issue shambling man-in-a-suit monster, well this is Doctor Who after all. The problem-solving monologues in the imaginary TARDIS are a neat spin on Sherlock Holmes’s mind palace, and I will accept the memories of Clara as falling short of her resurrection, so Face the Raven keeps its four stars for now.

As the final pennies drop, and the reason for the Doctor’s seemingly demented physical attack on the azbantium wall becomes clear, the solution to the puzzle box is married with an appalling sense of just what an enormous cost this victory has come at. Fans of the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day may be interested to know that in Danny Rubin’s rather darker original screenplay, it was clear the Phil Connors was trapped not just for a few decades but thousands or even millions of years.

Just before we move on to the final scenes, a few quick points. Firstly, as with the Chronolock last week, the rules aren’t especially clear. It’s established fairly early on that everything in the castle resets itself, but the skulls in the sea outside don’t (so after two billion years, they should be high above the water-line, surely?) and neither – luckily for the Doctor – does that azbantium wall. Secondly, I’m not sure what the second law of thermodynamics has to say about each of the Doctor’s bodies containing enough energy to generate the next one, but with a skull left over each time.

Finally, as well as liking puzzles more than dramatic resolutions, I’ve also taken Steven Moffat to task this year for storytelling loops or narrative vamping. Pages of script which might be full of jokes and incident but do nothing to advance the plot, because they keep one or more characters in a “holding pattern” or return them unchanged to their starting point. I will be very interested to see just how relevant this episode is to next week’s, or whether in fact one could go from the end of Raven to the beginning of Hell, apparently missing nothing.

What makes me suspicious is the reveal that this castle of horrors was the Doctor’s own confession dial. This is presented as an explanation but in fact it is anything but. It raises far more questions, chiefly if this was the Doctor’s own confession dial, then why are its workings a mystery to him? And we still don’t have an answer to the question of why he sent it to Missy in the first place.

Standing alone from the rest of the season, this is a mighty achievement. Funny, excited, impossible to get ahead of, and with a resolution that actually makes sense, while proudly brandishing its absurd ambition. It’s clearly worth five stars if only for Capaldi’s titanic performance and if next week’s episode ends up tarnishing it a little, I will take my disappointment out on the story total score rather than downgrading this one.

Eleven down, one to go…

I rather like formal games. Movies like Rope (all shot in one take – supposedly) or Interview (with essentially a speaking cast of two) excite me immediately. The best of them make a virtue of the formal constraint, telling a story which wouldn’t make sense without it. Some of them make the constraint into more of a gimmick, which might still be admirably clever but is less likely to quite so thrilling. Sometimes, it’s just an annoying distraction.

Doctor Who stories with this kind of constraint are rare and usually the product of a last-minute scramble to get a script ready. The Edge of Destruction, a faintly demented psychodrama set entirely inside the TARDIS and featuring only the regular cast was an act of desperation on the part of the first script editor David Whitaker when not only the TARDIS set but also the Dalek seven-parter had proved far more expensive than anticipated and two more cheapie episodes had to be magicked out of nowhere to keep the show on the road. Similarly, when Derrick Sherwin cut The Dominators from six episodes to five, The Mind Robber had to gain an episode which would only the regular cast and some standing sets (plus some left-over robot costumes from another series).

In the modern era, despite both show-runner’s zeal for headlines, most of the attention-grabbing aspects of the stories have come from their content rather than their form. Sometimes just their titles: The Next Doctor, The Doctor’s Daughter, The Doctor’s Wife etc. Midnight has something of this quality, but the prologue and coda and the overall large size of the cast mean that it doesn’t have quite the same feel. 42 has a very clear constraint – played out in real-time in exactly 42 minutes, but otherwise feels like quite an ordinary slab of mid-Russell Who.

So because of its found-footage gimmick Sleep No More already feels like something a bit out of the ordinary, and it’s not clear (even less so than with The Girl Who Died) whether it is part one of a two parter, contributing to the overall season arc, a true stand-alone story, or some other kind of narrative hybrid. The question will be – does the gimmick satisfyingly integrate itself into the story, is it an unwanted distraction, or is a nice addition but scarcely essential?

From the opening minutes, it’s clear that writer Mark Gatiss and the rest of the production team are doubling-down on the found-footage gimmick. There is no opening title sequence (a first in the show’s 52 year history), just a sort of space word-search (sorry, Doctor), and a dire warning from Reece Shearsmith, finally completing the League of Gentlemen guest star box set. We are introduced to yet another set of hard-to-differentiate cannon fodder, and then we meet the Doctor and Clara.

What follows is rather disappointing. Firstly, the found footage camera style largely just makes the action hard to follow. Secondly, surely someone at some point must have noticed how similar this is to Under the Lake? I don’t just mean they are both base-under-siege stories. They are both base-under-siege stories in which a largely deserted base is set upon by faceless and not entirely corporeal monsters with whom they struggle to communicate and from whom they must hide in special rooms. And this isn’t just linguistic trickery, pulling out the bits which sound the same and ignoring the rest. The two shows feel very much the same, even down to the use of closed-circuit camera footage, except that Sleep No More doesn’t have the time travel element to keep the narrative going.

When it doesn’t feel almost the same as Under the Lake, it has another problem. In the excellent book The Making of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry recalls a studio exec coming to see the filming of a scene from The Devil in the Dark. One of the more highly-regarded episodes of the series, turning a science fiction cliché on its head, the monster which is attacking innocent people turns out to be a mother protecting its young. However, on the day that the studio exec is present, Spock is being treated for his injuries and has the rather graceless line: “Captain, the monster attacked me!” So what the exec sees is a pointy-eared alien bleeding green blood attacked by a monster – pure sci-fi pulp nonsense!

Imagine turning on Sleep No More about half way through and seeing Peter Capaldi running away from those lumbering foam-rubber sleep monsters babbling about sentient mucus, or rolling around on the floor while they shake the cameras because of a “gravity shield failure”. It just looks and sounds like complete drivel. It doesn’t help that as the basically indistinguishable crew get gobbled up, and the explanations are slowly forthcoming, less and less makes any real sense, to the point where the Doctor himself is forced to conclude that the episode is basically nonsense.

And then, there’s that coda where Rasmussen admits that, rather too much like the Angels in The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, the speck of magic sand dust sleep mucus is embedded in the video rather than a physical item, and that the whole thing was just intended to make us watch so as to infect us. So – wait, does that mean that what we were watching didn’t really happen? If so, why not create a story which did make sense? Or at least not include a character who complains that it didn’t make sense. If it did really happen then how did Rasmussen avoid death? And it’s very out-of-character for the Doctor to leave with so many unanswered questions (or maybe he will continue his investigations next week). And if he has left (assuming he was there at all) and permitted this lethal message to be transmitted back to Earth, does that mean that in the 38^th Century, humans on Earth were wiped out by the Sandmen? Bluntly, this is a total mess and none of it makes any real sense at all.

All of which would be much more forgivable – the slightly pointless experimentation with form, the pick-and-mix supporting cast, the aching familiarity, the gibberish ending – if the whole thing had been even a little bit less dull. But this was probably the most boring episode of Doctor Who I’ve sat through in quite a long time. Bland characters in stock situations, a real dearth of good jokes and no spark of imagination.

Well, Shearsmith I suppose was good value and the notion of the Morpheus chamber, if not hugely original, is at least a compelling science-fiction hook. The “no helmet cams” reveal is quite nice – although what was that heads-up display stuff in the first five minutes in that case? – and Capaldi and Coleman continue to do good work with the very little which is available to them.

So, a major misstep in what has been quite a strong season so far. It’s hard to say whether I would have liked this more if it had been transmitted before Under the Lake rather than after, so I’m disinclined to mark it down too harshly for being repetitive, but for being nonsensical and especially for being boring, I have to deduct quite a lot of points. It’s better than the total nonsense of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, the wholly unsatisfactory In the Forest of the Night or the complete gibberish of The Wedding of River Song, but not nearly as interesting as good-but-not-great episodes like The God Complex or The Lodger. Let’s say two-and-a-half stars, whether or not any of these questions get answered in later episodes.

Bugger