Tom Salinsky

Note – spoilers throughout.

I always said it was a bad idea.

To be fair, I also said if anyone had a chance of pulling it off, it was Sean Foley, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, so I was prepared to give Dr Strangelove a chance. Plenty of beloved properties have been successfully reinvented over the years. The stage version can’t be the movie, arguably shouldn’t be the movie. Could it be successful on its own terms?

Ehhh… not really.

It’s not a failure, not by any means and Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George’s plot is still absolutely bomb-proof (pun intended) so if you’ve never been told this story before, there’s a good chance you’ll be in its spell, have a good time with the ripe performances and admire the bravura staging. But if you have even a passing familiarity with the original – or possibly even if you don’t – it’s hard to look past a series of surprising shortcomings. I think of these as forced errors, unforced errors and tonal blunders.

On screen, Peter Sellers plays three roles. Neurotic about his ability to summon up the Texan accent for Major Kong, he got himself signed off the picture after a minor accident on his first day in the cockpit, and Slim Pickens magnificently took over. That leaves one Peter Sellers on the air force base and two in the war room, which Kubrick achieves entirely with cutting and body doubles, never even trying to show both faces in the same frame. That luxury isn’t available to the stage team, and so various holes are introduced in the war room scenes where Coogan has to nip off stage, replaced on a spurious pretext and the change covered by a fairly unconvincing stand-in.

These pretexts distract from the action, the scenes lose momentum, and the fact that two key characters can’t talk to each other in the story’s final moments is a huge problem, but these are all forced errors. I don’t have any better solutions, and it wouldn’t make commercial sense to have another actor play the president, the least showy but most central of the Sellers parts.

We actually first see Strangelove via an early 1960s Zoom call, and when the Germanic scientist agrees to come and join him in person, Coogan as the president comments that that would make life easier “in some ways”. That’s a lovely joke, pressingly lightly on the fourth wall where others might have stampeded through it. It’s a rare moment of restraint, in a script which elsewhere feels like a child has gone through the movie screenplay, scribbling silly comments in the margins. In the movie, Mandrake bristles at Keenan Wynn, clocking his name badge and tartly observing “Colonel Bat Guano, if that really is your name.” Here Coogan just goes ahead and says “Guano? Like bird shit?” It’s such a good joke that we get Turgidson repeating the exact same words some moments later.

Now, stage and screen are very different animals, and there is an argument that the gag rate needs to be higher and the jokes need to be broader if the audience is there in person. And if the whole room had been rocking with laughter, I would have to admit that even though the vulgarity doesn’t seem to me to be an improvement on the elegant wit of the original screenplay, the piece was doing the job it set out to do. But only about one joke in five ever really landed the night I was there, with most punchlines met with soft chuckles, or total silence. If you’re committing to making this a wall-to-wall gagfest, then it needs to be Book of Morman funny, not middling student revue funny.

And these tonal lapses extend to the performances too. Coogan is quite bad as Mandrake, the part where you’d imagine he’d be most at home, playing him as a rubbery cross between Prince Charles and Alan Partridge, the script decorated with sub-PG Wodehouse British-ism like “Bally bingo bollocks” and other such drivel. That’s a shame as John Hopkins’s General Ripper is one of the highlights of the play, with just a little Donald Trump mixed into Sterling Hayden’s cigar-chomping lunacy. Coogan also struggles with Merkin Muffley, which is a better performance, but the comedy value in the president’s egg-headed earnestness seems to elude him and he badly muffs the hilarious phone call with Moscow, such a highlight of the original movie.

Once again, he’s paired with a brilliant performance from one of the supporting actors. Giles Terera, the original UK Aaron Burr in Hamilton, is terrific as Turgidson, effortlessly finding the tone which seems to be eluding so many others. Tony Jayawardena is pretty good as Ambassador Bakov too (but what was wrong with de Sadski?). Coogan is best by far as Strangelove himself, and here for once all of the pieces seem to come together, as the actor’s performance is neither a rendition of what Sellers did, nor a reaction against it, the new backstory adds rather than detracts, and Iannucci and Foley find a new way for this character to be funny.

If this was where we ended up, with some tonal lapses and some forced errors, I’d be happier to recommend this, but the unforced errors are completely confounding. Chief among these is the stuff on the B52. This is the least successful element of the whole evening. The projections are pretty, but by presenting the whole plane onstage, the production never puts us inside the cockpit, so there’s never a feeling of claustrophobia. And the two other pilots are woefully underwritten. But far more damaging are the plot changes introduced here.

A good screenplay is a piece of architecture and it’s hard to make one change without introducing problems elsewhere, and if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to get lost. Here, the function and the purpose of the doomsday device is muddled, with the first half making it clear that the machine has to be triggered manually, and the possibility existing of a deal to be struck whereby America destroys one of its own cities to stay the Premier’s hand (shades of Fail Safe). Only in the second half is it made clear that the whole purpose of the device is that it triggers itself automatically. And for no good reason, they cut the line “The Premier loves surprises.” This introduces confusion and gains us nothing.

But worse is to come, as the role of the OPE/POE “recall code” also gets garbled during the interval. In the first half, we’re told, in lines repeated verbatim from the movie, that the plane’s radios won’t receive at all unless messages are preceded by the appropriate three-letter-sequence (known only to the pilots and General Ripper). However, when we’re in the cockpit, this is changed to the sequence “POE” is a coded order to turn back, and rather than have the CRM discriminator destroyed when the plane is hit by the missile, it’s working fine, but Major Kong elects to ignore the order. And that change is fatal.

The American military was so worried by what the movie might do to American morale that they insisted a disclaimer be placed at the beginning. In my eyes, that only makes what follows more convincing. The nuclear deterrent is vulnerable to a single person making one bad decision and the weapons at our disposal are so devastating that the consequence could be the extinction of the human race.

Except here, where is takes two people to make bad decisions. And that isn’t as potent. Not by half.

Elsewhere, the character of Faceman adds very little, and Mark Hadfield is working way too hard. A laborious and relentlessly unfunny subplot about the Ambassador wanting fish does eventually lead us to a pretty great visual punchline, and – as noted – the production design is amazing. Most effective are probably the scenes between Ripper and Mandrake, as the physical effects and sound design really do summon up the bullets flying and Hopkins and Coogan play off each other very well. But time and again, the changes made to the script detract rather than add, sometimes in minor irritating ways, sometimes in major fatal ways.

I think the real missed opportunity here is the original ending. As written and initially shot, when the bombs began falling, the war room was to break into an enormous custard pie fight. Kubrick cut this (and destroyed the footage), feeling that it didn’t quite work to escalate from nuclear annihilation to prat falls – and he was very likely right. But onstage, the calculus is different. The bombs don’t feel as viscerally real – but the custard pies would. The actual ending isn’t bad, as a ghostly Vera Lynn transports us to a musical afterlife, but I can’t help but imagine what a more slapstick finale might have looked like. A little bit of sweaty messiness but have helped this very slick but often sterile production gain a bit more intensity.

Megalopolis need not detain us for very long. The story behind the story is vastly more interesting than what is on the screen. Genius filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who once had a clear vision for how to turn Mario Puzo’s pulpy best-seller into a towering work of cinematic iconography, who had already bankrupted himself once trying to reimaging how Hollywood worked in the 1980s, now liquidates a small fortune in order to make his dream project which has been gestating for decades. Sadly, the money men who refused to finance this one were dead right, as it isn’t so much a story as an incredibly lengthy music video, in which random images are juxtaposed in the hope that something of meaning will emerge, but sadly it never does. Busily acting in at least five different films are Adam Driver (fine), Aubrey Plaza (dazzling), Shia LaBeouf (I mean, you know), Nathalie Emmanuel (vacant), Chloe Fineman (huh?) and Dustin Hoffman – who is not so much wasted as carelessly discarded. Avoid.

Of far more interest is The Substance which gives us Demi Moore (able to play a stunning-looking 50-year-old at the age of 60, which is quite remarkable in itself) as fired TV aerobics star and one-time movie actor Elisabeth Sparkle. Desperate to cling on to youth, beauty and all the opportunities those allow, she experiments with The Substance, and with a suitably flagrant disregard for such trivialities as the conservation of mass, she splits open along her spine to reveal a younger, hotter, more Margaret Qualley-ish her. However, The Substance has rules, chiefly that Elisabeth’s consciousness must switch from body-to-body every seven days – no exceptions. But Qualley has far more fun than Moore, so this isn’t easy to sustain.

It’s vital to understand what writer/director Coralie Fargeat cares about and what she doesn’t to appreciate this film. Qualley reinvents herself as “Sue” and strolls back into her old job, which Dennis Quaid’s revolting producer is only too happy to give her. Consider that she has no references, no agent, no bank account, no social security number, not even a last name. Even given that we swallow the magical powers of The Substance (and Elisabeth’s ease with following the very skimpy instructions), what follows is completely impossible. But who could give two shits about any of that when we have the gleeful fun of watching the older Elisabeth’s body progressively falling to pieces as the younger version saps more and more of her life essence away – to say nothing of that completely preposterous grand guignol ending?

What Fargeat does care about is tactility. Everything in this movie, from clothing to medical equipment to flesh to food – especially food – squishes and oozes and rustles and scrapes. From the opening shots, her camera comes right into pore level on the actors’ faces, and the early scene of Quaid slurping down shrimp does something to prepare the ground for the body horror that’s to come – although nothing can really prepare you for the onslaught of the film’s final act.

Moore and Qualley are tremendous, but amongst all of this bravura splatter-gore, it’s two quieter moments that stick with me. The opening overhead shot is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, and the extended sequence of Moore being unable to leave her apartment for her date with an old school friend is utterly devastating. Although both this and Megalopolis look like films of which you could say similar things – crazy, bonkers, you’ve never seen anything like it, etc. – the difference is that Coppola’s film feels like wild horses rode through the screenplay destroying everything in their path, whereas for all its batshit excesses, Fargeat’s film always knows exactly what it wants to be and exactly what it’s doing.

My only criticism is shouldn’t “Elisa-sue” have been “Eli-sue-beth” instead?

Nostalgia sells, whether it’s Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman in The Flash, Harrison Ford reprising his role as Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny, Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman in Batgirl, Harrison Ford reprising his role as Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 or now Michael Keaton reprising his role as Beetlejuice in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Who cares that you first played the role when you were mid-thirties and now you’re early-seventies? There’s nothing the public likes more than a legacy sequel. Despite the fact that of the movies mentioned above one was shelved, three lost money and only one – the one under discussion – looks like the studios’ familiar-IP, target-the-boomers, stay-safe strategy has actually worked.

How amazing then, that it’s the film I liked the least out of the ones listed above?

Blade Runner 2049 is a bit ponderous, but it’s a decent stab at a follow on to an all-time classic that didn’t need it. Dial of Destiny flails about a bit but includes some impressive sequences. The Flash is a mess but has a certain amount of charm. Obviously, I haven’t seen Batgirl. But this? The long-awaited follow-up to the 1988 film which solidified the star status of Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, which made stars of Michael Keaton, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman? The beloved cult favourite which spawned an animated spin-off, multiple video games and a Broadway musical? This is a trainwreck.

The original’s storytelling is both brilliantly original and elegantly streamlined. Happy couple Adam and Barbara die in a freak accident and end up with their dream house haunted by the living. To drive out the new arrivals, they enlist the help of a demon but that help comes with strings attached. It makes only as much sense as it needs to (the vagaries of how life after death works are conveniently hidden behind a hilariously hard-to-parse handbook), the performances are top-notch, and Burton hasn’t yet fallen victim to the leaden paced staging which sank the almost-wonderful Mars Attacks (and often plagues both his Batman films).

This is beset with problems, right from the off. The opening sally with Monica Bellucci staple-gunning herself back together is deliciously macabre, even if we’ve seen the visual before in countless other Burton joints (she’s a blend of Edward Scissorhands, Emily the Corpse Bride and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, probably others). But rather than presenting a problem for anyone we care about, her character listlessly orbits the main plot of the film, endlessly repeating her signature packing cube death-for-the-dead routine, before turning up at the finale in time to be very easily despatched.

And you can say the same about all the various plot strands, of which there are far too many, none of them intersecting in interesting ways, so the overall effect is like switching channels between about five different (or rather indifferent) unrelated Beetlejuice sequels. Did you prefer the pitch about how Lydia is getting married to a douche who doesn’t believe she can see ghosts? How about Lydia’s daughter Astrid having the hots for a dishy demon in a tree house? Can you bring yourself to give a shit about Lydia’s daughter’s dead dad, who was killed at sea? Or would you rather we spent time with Delia, trying to reunite with her husband who was killed… (checks notes) also at sea, it seems. Tell you what, how about we have an actor who used to play a cop on TV who now runs the underworld police? No? What if we could get Willem Dafoe? Honestly, it feels like the studio got half-a-dozen different pitches and just said yes to all of them.

Only Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara return for this go-around. Glenn Shadix died in 2010, and recasting Otho seemingly wasn’t considered. Davis and Baldwin were presumably too expensive and/or old (and Baldwin has his own misfortunes to contend with) – but the Maitlands are discarded with about the lamest line of barely-even-exposition I’ve ever heard – “they found a loophole and moved on,” which felt like a real “fuck you” to a loyal audience and a pair of terrific actors who were at the centre of the original. And obviously, we can’t be giving Jeffrey Jones any work, so – very wisely – almost the first thing the film does is to write-out Charles Deetz…

…and then depicts the character’s last moments with a Claymation puppet of Jeffrey Jones…

…and then has pictures of Jeffrey Jones on various bits of props and set dressing…

…and then makes Charles Deetz’s funeral a significant setting and plot point…

…and has another actor in a revolting half-eaten costume run around the underworld sets while someone impersonates Jeffrey Jones’s voice…

Excuse me? This is how you make sure that nobody watching this film has cause to remember what Jeffrey Jones was arrested for in 2002. And 2004. And 2010. What the actual fuck?

And for a film presumably made for fans of the original (surely no-one else would sit still for the hour or so it takes for this slovenly movie to finally generate any kind of forward plot momentum) it’s remarkably bad at sticking to the few rules established in the first one, and sometimes the writers seem to mis-remember what happened to Lydia vs what happened to Barbara. Lydia knows that “home home home” will get her out of Beetlejuice’s world (which only Adam and Barbara would know) but doesn’t know that when you’ve let Beetlejuice out, you have to put him back (which surely would have been one of the things Barbara told her at the same time as she told her about “home home home”).

And the one thing we surely all know about how being dead works in Beetlejuice films is that upon dying, you are translated back to the place you will be haunting with only an unreadable handbook for explication. Yet, everyone who dies in the sequel (Charles Deetz, Delia, and seemingly Richard, Astrid’s dad) is taken straight to the afterlife waiting room instead. And as more details pile up about exactly how the afterlife works, it starts to become banal and ordinary, instead of the fascinating and inexplicable glimpses which were all we were afforded last time. Nothing exemplifies this more than a bored looking Michael Keaton re-enacting a particularly dull episode of The Office with a small army of shrunken head underlings. This is what I wanted from the long-awaited return of The Ghost with Most – a bonkers subplot about new HR processes.

Among the slurry there are a few bright spots. Justin Theroux is having fun as Lydia’s sleazy boyfriend (although a little of him goes a long way). Burn Gorman is rather a treat as the pragmatic Father Damien. Beetlejuice himself isn’t overused, and although he isn’t always used effectively, when he is, the film does come to life – such as in the very funny couples counselling scene. And although we do get a rendition of Day-O, by and large the musical palate has shifted to soul and disco, which is a great way to freshen up a familiar idea. Although the lack of tension when Astrid is being taken away on the Soul Train is extraordinary (and Jenna Ortega is never given anything interesting to do). Finally, the end of the second film is essentially identical to the end of the first one – only not set up as well.

This is barely a film at all. It’s a dozen different ideas for things that could happen in a Beetlejuice sequel slopped into a cauldron and ladled out in an arbitrary order. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that, of all directors, Tim Burton isn’t really in command of the storytelling here, but he’s hardly stretching himself as a visual stylist either. This was a film I was really looking forward to, but sad to say, it’s not only dead on arrival, rigor mortis has firmly set in.

I said it last time, and it bears repeating: the build-up is easy and the payoff is hard. One of the best ways of making the payoff really land is to have our hero achieve victory at some personal cost. The first two RTD season finales achieved this with considerable style. In Doomsday, the Doctor loses Rose and in The Parting of the Ways, he loses his life (he got better). Subsequent finales didn’t have the same power, with David Tennant’s exit undermined a little by his rather self-indulgent pre-expiry victory lap.

But we knew, or I guess we knew, that Russell wasn’t going to kill Ruby, murder Mel or have Ncuti make an early exit. So the nearest we get to a squeeze of vinegar to help the triumph over adversity feel a bit more earned is the reunion between birth mother and daughter, which felt real and complicated in the best tradition of nu-Who, but came after the villain was summarily despatched and all of the dusted citizens of the universe popped back into life again.

The other problem for finales is you have to answer all of those niggling questions. So, yes, we find out that Ruby’s mother was just a girl young in trouble, but her significance to those travelling in the TARDIS – a TARDIS with a malevolent quasi-Egyptian god wrapped invisibly around it – created a weak point in time. That’s a fair enough explanation as far as it goes, but I can only assume that the Time Window was using a hefty dose of artistic license as it depicted her pointing out a signpost to nobody with such melodramatic flair.

And of course, as soon as the world turns to sand, the spectre of a reset button rears its head. That’s the problem with bringing the apocalypse as opposed to merely threatening it. But the world stayed dead for an appreciable amount of time, and – thanks to that heartbreaking scene with Sian Clifford – we felt it as opposed to were merely informed about it. The journey also contained much that was worthwhile, with Bonnie Langford doing wonderful work, whether roaring through “London” on a Vespa, tenderly fondling Colin Baker’s old tie, collapsing in near-exhaustion on the floor of the TARDIS, or possessed by Sutekh and giving us magnificent claw-hand-of-evil acting.

Ncuti and Millie showed their class here too, with Millie’s fake-out “God of nothing” moment being a stand-out – and if you thought the secret of her mum was pure bathos, then here’s the Doctor saving the day with bungee cord, a whistle and a spoon. Detailed explanations of the whistle and the spoon were apparently both written and then discarded in favour of more showing-not-telling. It’s fine to cut pedantic explanations if they aren’t needed, but this walks a fine line between “It’s a neat trick, I’ll explain later” and “Details are boring, on with the adventure.” I think it’s on the right side of that line, but it’s a close one.

So, this is an episode of moments rather than a truly cohesive hour of storytelling, but many of the moments are fabulous, with Kate Stewart’s sign off, the Remembered TARDIS, Mrs Flood cos-playing as Romana/The White Guardian/Mary Poppins/Jackanory and Ncuti’s howl of despair into the echoing void. It’s clear this is a TARDIS team for the ages, but I hope next year Russell remembers that he doesn’t have to end the entire universe for us to care – sometimes just seeing two characters holding hands in adversity is enough.

I made the mistake of posting an eye-rolling Tweet about how the season’s mysterious big bad isn’t going to be the Valeyard – a villain associated with a charismatic performer, which looks to devoted fans like a dangling loose end in the series’ mythos, but whose backstory doesn’t really make any coherent sense in the broadcast episodes, let alone invites further forensic investigation. With the passing of Michael Jayston, the already thoroughly remote prospect of this complicated enemy being returned to receded further into the darkest recesses of possibility. Replying to another fan, I agreed that it was equally unlikely that we’d be seeing Fenric, or the Rani, or Harrison Chase, or the Drahvins. Ha ha ha. Well done to me.

Except that I started that list with Sutekh.

Now, on reflection, Sutekh is one of the few badguys from the classic series whose return does make sense. Pyramids of Mars is a very well-remembered story (not least because it was one of the very first released on VHS), from the most highly-regarded era of the show, but there’s nothing about him which particularly needs to be explained to the new viewer. Partly because he wasn’t invented by Robert Holmes, who was riffing on Hammer Horror versions of the Mummy’s Tomb and flipped through the Big Boys Book of Egyptian Mythology to find the right name. Partly because everything you need to know is right there on the screen.

And, yes, this does feel like the Russell T Davies Stolen Earth/Army of Ghosts/Bad Wolf playbook, with a certain amount of narrative vamping in the early going, and then an acceleration into a mind-blowing reveal at the end. That isn’t a particularly difficult bit of writing, but neither is it trivial, and while this makes it look easy, let’s not overlook some of the grace notes in the writing and the directing. The Time Window is a wonderful device, brilliantly executed. The agony of not quite being able to see the face of Ruby’s mother is exquisite (and just how far away were those security cameras?). The Su-Tech gag is delightful, as is UNIT’s casual dismissal of the S. Triad anagram. All the characters pop – maybe except for Rose who doesn’t get much to do here. But I loved the new 13-year-old scientific advisor and I adored Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together.

But, of course, and by design, this is all build-up and no payoff. And build-up is easier. If this doesn’t all come together next week, that could well tarnish this episode’s reputation. I liked Dark Water a lot more before I’d seen Death in Heaven. But for now, for the ascent to the top of the rollercoaster, this is faultlessly done, with all departments firing on all cylinders, so once again, it’s the full five stars from me.

Weirdly, as I watch toxic parts of the internet melt down in a froth of racism and homophobia (“Two men kissing, urgh!” “My Doctor would never dance to Kylie” “Does he have to say ‘honey’?”) what I loved about this episode was how unashamedly traditional it was. It takes real craft, and skill, and care, to take a solid science fiction run-around and really make it work, ramping up the stakes, pulling surprises on the audience and have it all (or almost all) make sense. This isn’t a galaxy-ending catastrophe, or a rewriting of everything we thought we knew about the Doctor’s history. It’s some malevolent monsters whose fun means innocent people suffer, and our hero is going to stop them – hurrah!

As is rapidly becoming the norm, we don’t waste time with tedious TARDIS scenes in which the leads ponderously decide to go to the environment we already saw in the teaser – the Doctor and Ruby are just there. But while Ruby is having fun soaking up the atmosphere, Ncuti has spotted an “evil leaper” watching from the balcony. With the exception of Captain Jack, who shares some DNA with the titular Rogue, it’s rare in Doctor Who to see a dark version of the central character. The Master is just another villain, but Rogue has a mission, and he thinks he’s the good guy, which makes him fascinating. And it makes perfect sense to me that this most open, empathetic and warm-hearted of Doctors would be attracted to him. I’m sorry, did you prefer David Tennant wholesomely falling for Madame Pompadour? You do remember that that love affair began when she was a child, right?

One of several brilliant story devices is that Rogue thinks there’s only one Childer at the party, whereas we know there are two – but our smugness doesn’t last very long, because there are actually three! No, five! No, six! And, yes, I was completely hoodwinked by the Ruby switcheroo at the end (not least thanks to Millie Gibson’s wonderful evil bird acting), and I briefly considered that this might be a Face the Raven-style situation where the companion’s seeming death sets up the season-ending two-parter.

So, this has wonderful costumes, solid plotting, great guest stars (Indira Varma is sensational), it’s got a strong emotional core, and it kept me guessing all the way to the end. Are there niggles? Yeah, a couple. Jonathan Groff has charisma to burn, but he seems so determined to create a contrast to Ncuti’s exuberance that he ends up underplaying to a fault. Revealing a few more layers towards the end would have been nice – we know he has the range. And on a rewatch, I’m not super-convinced about the Doctor glimpsing the unconscious Childer in her turquoise dress and somehow coming to the conclusion that Ruby in her yellow dress is therefore dead. Why didn’t he examine the body? I also think that the details of how the trap worked, and just what allowed Rogue to substitute himself for Ruby, could have been set up a little more clearly.

These are definitely niggles though, and very far from fatal flaws, because this was hugely entertaining, and certainly a more reliable model for stories going forward than the more outré offerings which we began the season with. Just one more thing – is he going to cry in every episode? It doesn’t have nearly as much impact fifth time round.

Well, this seems to have delighted, shocked, disappointed and enraged people in equal measure. As is typical for this iteration of the show, it’s a wildly atypical episode, again sidelining the Doctor – and this time Ruby too – giving us a thoroughly unlikeable leading character; and then rather than giving her a redemption arc, revealing further despicable layers as the story unfolds.

The opening is pretty standard sub-Black Mirror, isn’t-social-media-awful stuff. Russell T Davies’s writing across all genres is typified by big operatic emotions and hard-to-miss social commentary. There isn’t a lot of subtlety in most of what he does – and yet, there is a detail about the world of Finetime which it is at least possible to miss, and that’s the monochromatic nature of the cast.

In the classic era of the show, this was just the way of things. You tended not to see non-white actors in British television unless there was some very specific reason. And sometimes that didn’t seem like it was helping overmuch. Season 25 features one Black man per story – a descendent of slavery, a blues musician, a jazz musician and a rapper. Yikes. Casting even one non-white actor just because that’s what modern Britain looks like doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone until we get to Battlefield and Survival and that’s arguably too late.

When tall, posh, white men are the default, it doesn’t look like identity politics to only centre them. But casting only white actors is also a choice, it also makes a statement. Casting Jodie Whitaker meant that the possibility existed that some characters might think differently of the Doctor, even compared to beta-males like Troughton or McCoy, but this wasn’t something which Chris Chibnall felt like exploring. I would say this was because he worried about weakening the character, but his version of the Doctor was almost uniquely panicky, inept, cowardly and immoral, so I dunno what he was worried about. So far, Ncuti Gatwa’s ethnicity has yet to be a plot point. Until the hammerblow ending of this episode.

I kind of wish that Lindy Pepper-Bean and her ghastly crew had spelled out their objection. Their dialogue in the climactic scene is almost coy. There’s a really thought-provoking question being asked here – do you try and save the irredeemable? But it’s undercut slightly because the script can’t bring itself to actually say what the characters are clearly thinking. Not that I think this story needed a rewrite by Quentin Tarantino you understand, it just didn’t sound entirely natural. And Ncuti Gatwa – on his first day on set for this season – is spectacular as first he can’t comprehend what he’s being told, and then, suddenly, horribly, he can.

The bigger problem with the episode is that by telling the story so rigidly from Lindy’s point-of-view, we’re forced to spend most of the running time with a vacuous, selfish, self-centred character. I get why the structure is necessary to make the ending work, but it felt like the tail wagging the dog a bit to me. So, this was another bold stroke from a series which is determined to experiment in every way it can, but a slightly awkward viewing experience for me. Not because I was being forced to confront my own prejudice, just because Callie Cooke was doing such a good job of creating such an unlikeable lead, and I’d rather have spent more time with the Doctor.

Thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome, and to everyone’s surprise, George Miller returned to the world of Mad Max and brought us the astonishing Fury Road, which hoovered up dollars, acclaim and awards in pretty much equal measure. Since, by all accounts, a detailed backstory for Charlize Theron’s Furiosa had already been written, the surprise this time around is that it took a further nine years for the prequel to hit our screens. But, while the new film is still a wildly entertaining, beautifully shot, thrill-ride, it doesn’t have the ice-water shock of the 2015 film, and nor does it have anything new to say, despite being a good half-hour longer.

What it does do is split its narrative into individually-named chapters, a gimmick I always appreciate. But while this lends a welcome feeling of a sure hand on the tiller – “I know you aren’t sure what the story is quite yet, but sit back, you’re in safe hands” – I came away feeling I’d seen half-a-dozen very exciting but rather samey short action films. Fury Road didn’t have this gimmick and didn’t need it. It was stripped to the bones. The first half is running away and the second half is going back again. Nothing else is needed.

Here, it’s all a bit more complicated and convoluted. We don’t even see Anya Taylor-Joy (taking over from an absent Theron) until about an hour in, because we’re seeing the adventures of a prepubescent Furiosa first. And it’s all very well done, with a nice turn from Tom Burke in the middle, and there’s no shortage of demented action set pieces, eye-popping visuals and the familiar rogues gallery of badguys and misfits. Miller even seems to be aping Sam Raimi with his bonkers push-ins through the windscreens of various vehicles, and there’s almost as much undercranking here as in a 1960s James Bond movie.

Saving grace of what could have been a fine, rather exhausting, over-familiar affair is the amazing performance of Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, and it’s greatly to the film’s credit that the climactic scene is all about him and Furiosa as people, rather than as ballistic objects.

Speaking of ballistic objects, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers sees a profoundly odd trio of actors (Spiderman’s girlfriend, Prince Charles and Riff from West Side Story) hashing out their complicated romantic feelings via the medium of tennis. I wouldn’t have seen this coming from the director of Call Me By Your Name, who’s always proven to be a keen observer of human nature, but who hasn’t previously struck me as much of a visual stylist. Here he goes to town on the material, slamming Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score into ordinary dialogue scenes, shooting arguments like tennis matches and tennis matches like video games.

Too much of this stuff and you’d get the impression that the director doesn’t trust the material, a feeling emphasised by the free-floating timeline with early scenes turning up in what almost feels like a random order. But the playing of the three leads holds it together and when a should-be low-stakes tennis match in a no-name tournament starts to become the spine of the story, the central trunk to which all the other scenes connect, then it comes fully into focus. Just as I was beginning to get exasperated at it, the pulpy soap-opera plotting pulled me back in, and then I surrendered to the beguiling excess of it all.

I didn’t know we were getting a Doctor-lite episode.

I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers – I didn’t know that Boom was about the Doctor spending the whole episode standing on a landmine until about a day before the episode aired – and so it came as quite a surprise when we followed Ruby away from the TARDIS. It came as an even greater surprise when the “Welsh Folk Horror” aspect of the story turned out to be one of several narrative feints. It’s easy to get fed up with a tale in which nothing is ever what it seems because sometimes the audience stops trusting the storyteller. But this is such a beguiling installment, built around such a chilling image, that that never bothered me.

And it’s about something. It’s not a puzzle to be solved – we’ll come back to that in a minute – it’s rather a deep, sad, meditation on loss and loneliness and the fear of abandonment. Ruby’s mother locking her out and telling her that the woman who gave birth to her didn’t want her either is savage in its ferocity. How does anyone bounce back from that? Well, in a typical edition of a fast-moving science fiction adventure anthology show, they kill a monster or defeat a badguy and then it’s all smiles. But in reality, you just keep on living.

And amazingly, that’s what happens to Ruby. UNIT can’t help her, the Doctor can’t help her, she can’t help herself, and so she just lets the years roll by. And sure, after the first time jump, the prospect of a reset button at the end of the episode looms very large, and by the time she’s an elderly woman, it’s pretty much guaranteed. But a reset button need not render the entirety of the preceding action moot – even if none of the characters can remember anything. Sometimes the journey is worthwhile. And this was so creepy, so suspenseful, so heartfelt, so bleak and yet so sunny, that it really was.

Various people are complaining online that the ending didn’t make sense or wasn’t resolved, but I was thrilled not to have to wade through endless turgid minutes of science fiction plot admin. Ruby loses the Doctor when they break the circle which trapped Mad Jack. Ruby has to neutralise Mad Jack to have any hope of putting things back the way they were, but she still has to go the long way round. When future Ruby stops the circle from being damaged, the cycle is broken and she and the Doctor can go on their way. If you wanted to be told that the was all due to the Galactic War between the Zagbars and the Zoobles and that the old lady was the Zagbarian Ambassador caught in a temporal flux and trying to stop Earth from being caught in the crossfire, I understand your frustration, but I think you have to accept that that wasn’t what this story was trying to be. This was something much more allegorical, much less literal.

And so, no, I don’t think threads from that ending will be returned to. Clearly there’s a lot going on already – even Ruby has started to notice that Susan Twist keeps cropping up – but the ending of the episode didn’t give me the impression of a writer saying “And here are some unanswered questions that you need to keep in mind for next time.” It felt final, complete and for me at least completely satisfying. Much of this is due to the extraordinary work done by Millie Gibson who makes every aspect of Ruby’s bizarre journey totally believable. As sad as I was not to see more of Ncuti this time round, this was an exceptional episode of Doctor Who which kept me guessing right to the very end.

Having Steven Moffat back writing new scripts for the show was certainly a surprise, and many think his very best Doctor Who work was under RTD’s stewardship, so expectations were high. It’s a signature Moffat conceit, taking one idea and making it work for the entire run-time. Here I think he’s very successful, on the whole. There are countless developments, revelations, raisings of the stakes and they pretty much all come off. You can tell listening to the commentary how pleased he is with the twist of Ruby getting felled by friendly fire and, fair enough, it’s brilliant.

Ncuti Gatwa continues to just do exceptional work here. He really is the Doctor now, and is pulling off that oh-so-difficult trick of being exactly the same character and yet totally different from any of his predecessors. But there are niggles. Firstly, it’s the benevolent-automated-system-run-amuck yet again. True, these are set up in the opening, rather than being the final hopefully-devastating revelation. And, yes, the added wrinkle that it’s all part of the same capitalistic warmongering plan as the mines themselves feels fresh (apart from a tiny whiff of familiarity from The Doctor’s Daughter). But we had SO MANY of these devices in the Eccleston/Tennant/Smith days (The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Silence in the Library, The Lodger, The Girl Who Waited, The Curse of the Black Spot, and probably more besides) that one of the saving graces of Chibnall’s run was I really thought we’d seen the last of them. But, no, here it is again with its placating catchphrases and serenely beaming countenance.

Then there’s the fact that very small cast, who all pretty terrific, are not all used to full capacity. In particular, not only is Ruby out cold and playing no part in the climax, Carson does a lot of standing around saying nothing after he’s nobbled Ruby, and Splice is just told to watch a slide show and shut up. Add to this, the fact that – out of necessity – the craterous warzone has been created entirely in the studio, and the ambulances look like the cleaners out of Paradise Towers, and we might be heading to near miss territory here.

What brings us back is the strong playing of the cast – who’d have guessed we’d be seeing next year’s companion this early? – the very effective ramping up of tension and some amazing moments, like the rock-hard Doctor taking three blasts to the right hand and not even flinching. I even didn’t mind the reprise of the Anglican Marines, which to me landed like world-building and not like “oh this again”, but if I’d not been enjoying the rest of the story so much, maybe that would have grated too.

So, it’s a terrific premise, handled with skill and style, brilliantly played by an incredible cast. But it looks a bit cheap, and some of the parts so cleverly assembled are a trifle shopworn and over-familiar. However, it’s very entertaining stuff, and crucially, we’re seeing the format stretched again which is all to the good. I loved the tone of the ending too. Four stars.