Tom Salinsky

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.

Doctor Who is a uniquely flexible format, and while there were some off-putting things in the first four RTD2 stories (“mavity”, singing goblins, sonic forcefields, cartoon mallets), as a set they express the enormous range of possibilities that the series can provide, from creepy space opera, to giant terrifying production numbers, to whimsy, to deep emotion. And possibly the most exciting thing about the new season was the new Doctor. After several goes (with varying levels of success) at portraying a closed off, emotionally-stunted timelord, this time we’re getting someone open-hearted, generous and compassionate. It’s a great place to take the character.

And superficially, this is the 2005 playbook revisited: establish the rules; take a trip to the unfamiliar future; take a trip to the more-familiar past. And we get to do it all in a single night as – for the first time ever – we got two new episodes on the same day. But rather than express all the different things the show can be – scary, funny, exuberant, dark, mournful, thrilling, thoughtful, silly, angry – we got two potentially divisive episodes back-to-back which were both bizarre in much the same way. Three if you count the baby-eating goblins at Christmas. That doesn’t send the message “here’s a show that can do anything”. Rather, it sends the message “Hope you like bodily functions and people pulling faces, because that’s the show now.” Of course, both stories have more to offer than that, but after such a strong opening quartet, I can’t understand why we now have two such defiantly quirky episodes right out the gate. It’s unlikely to win new fans and it’s almost guaranteed to anger existing ones.

Taking Space Babies first, I have no problem with the so-called exposition dump as Ruby peppers the Doctor with questions. I wished that the “butterfly” moment hadn’t been in the trailer, as I thought it was the set-up for a whole story and not a single throwaway gag. Exploring the space station is suitably suspenseful, the babies are eerily convincing, and Golda Rosheuvel’s Nanny was a nice blend of warmth and tension. Only Ncuti’s repeated tic of “Babies – space babies!” grated just a bit, and the political points seemed grafted-on rather than emerging naturally from the underlying story logic. But my taste in humour doesn’t include snot and nappies, and I’m rather dismayed that the definition of the problem and a major part of its solution has to put these elements front-and-centre. Still, it should prove that Disney’s funding isn’t Americanising the scripts as the “Bogeyman” pun only works in British English.

The heart-and-soul of the episode is the Doctor risking his own life to save the slavering beast which for all its scary and slobbery appearance is simply playing its own innocent part in the narrative. The effects work is top-notch here, but compared to the wallop of the Doctor’s conversation with suddenly-childless Carla Sunday, it doesn’t have much in the way of depth or drama. It’s kinetic, rather than truly moving, if you see what I mean. The only properly quiet moment is the weird meta-textual reprise of the end of Ruby Road. The rest is a slightly odd remix of The Beast Below and The Impossible Planet, buoyed by Millie Gibson and especially Ncuti Gatwa, but never feeling like it amounts to very much.

Rusty hangs a lantern on the repeated baby image in an effort to make it seem like part of an unfolding master plan (which it may yet prove to be) rather than a paucity of imagination on the part of the showrunner. And he tries the same trick again with The Devil’s Chord which is clearly a re-run of The Giggle, from the 1920s opening, to the explosion of camp villainy, to the unexpected musical number at the end. Although given that it’s the third musical number in four episodes, I don’t know if “unexpected” really works. The problem is that telling us that the two stories are related doesn’t make the feeling of “oh, this again” go away. Jinkx Monsoon’s Maestro would have seemed much fresher if we hadn’t seen The Toymaker a few months ago, or indeed the Space Babies an hour ago.

What’s new is the meta-joke that even with Disney money, the show can’t afford to license any Beatles songs, and so the Doctor and Ruby’s trip back to Abbey Road coincides with an erasure of music from the world. And we get the Pyramids of Mars homage which Russell could never find space for in 2005. Inside all the whirl and dash of these stories there are lots of hints about a bigger, more complicated over-arching story. Adding to the hints about Ruby’s past, the cryptic warning from The Meep, and mystery of Mrs Flood, we now have even more warnings from Maestro, and the Doctor asserting that “things connect”.

Meanwhile, there are references to An Unearthly Child, both in the dialogue and on billboards, not to mention an acting role for venerable costume designer June Hudson. There’s also the repeated appearance of Coronation Street’s Susan Twist in multiple roles across various episodes. But a complicated series of connections won’t make a bad episode into a good one. And this isn’t bad exactly, but – again – what is it about? What does it mean? It doesn’t have Chris Chibnall’s inability to realise the dramatic potential of even the most extraordinary situations, thank goodness, nor his refusal to ever attempt both plot and character within the same scene, but it operates more on a sitcom level than anything we’ve had for ages, which is rather a waste of this incarnation, defined as he is by his previously-mentioned emotional intelligence.

For all that the interesting story seems to be at the fringes of the narrative and not at the centre, the second episode – which is ten minutes longer – feels better paced, even if the middle thirty minutes is basically one long extended confrontation scene. There are some deliciously weird and suspenseful moments here, and the notion that the beauty of music is what stops us from killing each other is both bleak and optimistic in rather a beguiling way. And yet there are some significant missed beats, as the Doctor hops from his panicky admission “I can’t fight this thing,” to the ironclad confidence of “I can find the chord to banish you,” in the space of twenty minutes without apparently having found anything new out, or weakened Maestro, or the situation having altered in any way at all.

Then there’s the issue that we have plenty of time for a song and dance routine at the end (which I’m fine with – of course a story which takes music away from humanity and then gives it back should celebrate its return) but no time at all to understand what happened between Maestro arriving in 1925 and then being banished in 1963. Even a couple of quick cuts to reassure us that time was reset and that music flourished in the intervening decades would have been helpful.

I can’t give Space Babies more than three – it’s so flimsy, so silly, and so scatological. The Devil’s Chord had some stronger moments and nearly reached four stars, but in the spirit of keeping my powder dry, I’ll award it 3.5. Each of these instalments was disappointing in some ways, fascinating and beguiling in others, but neither had the sureness of touch which the four specials demonstrated, and each seemed to think that it, and only it, was the one-off “oddball” episode from the middle of the season, when in fact the job they had to do was to set the tone for Doctor Who in 2024. Still, Moffat’s back next week, and everyone likes Moffat, right? Right?