Tom Salinsky

In 1925, Herman J Mankiewicz, newly employed Hollywood screenwriter, sent a famous telegram to fellow New Yorker Ben Hecht. “Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures? All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

In David Fincher’s film Mank this notorious missive is paraphrased, relocated to 1930, the recipient switched to Herman’s brother Joe, its status is lowered to that of a tired old running gag and it is shorn of its punchline. That’s this film all over: flagrantly inaccurate, its inventions usually less interesting and more confusing than the truth it rejects, freely borrowing other people’s witty remarks, but heedless as to what made those quips funny in the first place. Elsewhere, Sam Goldwyn’s famous barb about sending messages by Western Union is put in the mouth of Louis B Mayer and Mankiewicz himself adopts John Houseman’s savagely funny nickname for Orson Welles: Maestro The Dog-Faced Boy.

Mank, now trailing ten Oscar nominations in its wake, is (sort-of) the story of the writing of Citizen Kane. That’s a big problem right there. The actual process of writing, the hard graft of trying to construct a screenplay, the endless finessing of dialogue and action lines, the painstaking editing and re-editing, is rarely dramatic, and almost never cinematic. But whereas there are fascinating stories to be told about how Welles got the contract of a lifetime at RKO, why he wanted to collaborate with Mank and how they settled on Hearst as a suitable subject – not to mention the nearly catastrophic fallout when the film was completed – none of this is of interest to Fincher who starts the action with a 90 day countdown to Mank finishing the first draft and ends the movie before Welles starts shooting his.

That it’s Mank doing the writing means that Fincher (and his late dad Jack who wrote the script – given an uncredited polish by Eric Roth, irony fans) has swallowed the Pauline Kael Kool-Aid and is repeating the easily-debunked lie that Mank deserved sole credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay. Like Kael, Fincher’s camera just doesn’t look at it any of the writing of Kane done by Welles and thus concludes that he did none. In interviews, Fincher has claimed that he had no interest in attributing credit. But he was interested in the story of a man who agreed not to accept credit and then changed his mind. The sum total screentime which this debate occupies is less than two minutes. A great deal of the rest of it is rather ho-hum life-in-1930s-Hollywood flashback, which eventually and laboriously drags itself towards a slightly hysterical and mildly revisionist take on radical novelist Upton Sinclair’s run for Governor of California in 1934, which is then presented as Mankiewicz’s motivation for writing a satire about Hearst.

The facts are that Sinclair’s bid was harmed by “fake news” propaganda films released by MGM, and by poisonous columns in Hearst papers – although other papers were even more violently anti-Sinclair. Mank gilds this slim story with Herman being the only Sinclair supporter amid hundreds of loyal Republican MGM staffers, his personal crusade via his friendship with Marion Davies to prevent the films from being released, and the suicide of the writer-turned-editor-turned-director who was somehow goaded into creating these monstrosities. In real life, the editor of the films (who was previously employed by MGM as… checks notes… an editor) was perfectly happy with his work and made more of the same.

Mankiewicz had no involvement with Upton Sinclair whatsoever, and would no doubt have been drawn to the legend of Hearst even if he hadn’t first been a frequent guest at San Simeon and then been humiliatingly uninvited. So this is somewhat of a made-up answer in search of a suitable question. And the movie shifts gears abruptly when Mank’s aloof cynicism suddenly turns into messianic zeal as he briefly battles to prevent the forces of darkness from winning. It’s true that by this point in the film I was getting very fed up of people walking in and out of rooms, making mordant wisecracks at each other, always in the same monotonous rhythms, smothered by the ever-present score, and I dearly longed for there to be something at stake, for someone to strive for something, for me to be hoping for one outcome or dreading another. But its hard to escape the conclusion that Gary Oldman’s Mank adopts this role of desperate defender of all that is good and holy because he’s the protagonist of the movie since this behaviour is totally at odds with everything else we know about him. And this is the problem with making shit up to try and turn your slice-of-true-life into a screenplay. You need to make sure the pieces fit together and that what you’ve added to reality coheres with what was there before. Better to make up almost everything (as in Argo) – or just give up and make a documentary – if the fiction fails to mesh with the fact to this extent.

Take Mank’s relationship with Marion Davies. Probably the best scene in the entire film is their conversation in the garden of San Simeon. The score dies down, people stop quipping over each other and we just get to explore who these people are, and what they mean to each other. It has little to do with Welles or Kane or Sinclair or anything else but it does explore deeper themes of fame, wealth, notoriety and the power of narratives to shape our understanding of the world.

However, this largely-invented relationship now has to do battle with what most viewers already know. The person who came off worst from Citizen Kane was probably that same Marion Davies. Welles in several interviews is rather shamefaced about her, describing their depiction of Kane’s second wife as a “dirty trick” which unfairly tarnished the reputation of a basically blameless and clearly talented young woman. Obviously, at the time, the enterprising young screenwriters didn’t fully understand the consequences of their actions.

But, watching Mank, you are forced to conclude that Herman J Mankiewicz establishes a deep friendship and trust with Davies. Then, given total autonomy to write whatever screenplay he wishes, he chooses to write a version of Hearst and a version of Davies which wildly defames them both, and then when the damage this will do to Davies is pointed out to him – on two separate occasions – despite no pressure whatsoever in any other direction, he calmly leaves the screenplay exactly as it is without his conscience bothering him for a moment. And remember – the lesson he has supposedly learned from the Sinclair debacle is: movies can alter how people think. At this point, it’s impossible to try and understand who Herman Mankiewicz is. He’s reduced to a series of checkboxes and catchphrases, assembled at random.

There are other problems besides. While taking almost no time at all to school younger viewers as to who Welles is, what Citizen Kane is and why it matters, the script makes sure we know who individual characters are by having people greet them by name and most notable feature: “Thalberg! The boy genius!” “Herman Mankiewicz? New York playwright and drama critic?” Neither Mankiewicz nor Welles would ever have stood for that. Elsewhere, LB Mayer is “poppa” and WR Hearst is “pops” just in case you were having trouble keeping all these old white wisecracking men straight. About halfway through the film, everybody starts calling Hearst “Willy” to avoid confusion. And the Frankenstein plotting continues right to the end, where Mayer’s offer to buy the Kane negative off RKO for a little more than the film cost to make is bizarrely made before the script is even finished. And, a colossal bet that Mankiewicz makes on the outcome of the election is given huge weight and then never referred to again.

Performances are largely fine. Oldman is several decades too old for Mankiewicz, but maybe that fits given that Herman J essentially drank himself to death over many years. Sam Troughton makes a suitably fussy and pedantic John Houseman, Amanda Seyfried is very winning as Davies and Tom Burke catches something of Welles’ voice, although little of his wry self-reflection and megawatt charisma, while Charles Dance chews the scenery with predictable relish as Hearst.

And it all looks magnificent of course. One can only wonder if Fincher considered shooting it in 4:3 ala Zach Synder, but he fills the widescreen frame with period detail, including reel change marks, fake splices and type-written captions which, after they’ve appeared, scroll jerkily down the screen – you know, the way that paper in a typewriter doesn’t. It’s cute at first, but wearying after a while, like a precious child constantly demanding your attention.

There is a fascinating story here, and there are glimpses of what might have been. But the brilliance of the Kane script is (in part) that it takes a vastly complicated narrative, boils it down to only the most interesting and dramatic sequences and then erects a framing device which not only gives the whole enterprise a second layer of meaning, but avoids the need for any clumsy exposition to be given in dialogue. For a film which keeps making silly visual puns with the 1941 masterpiece, it’s amazing to look at the script and see that almost the exact opposite has been done in every single case. A fairly simple story has been made to seem more complicated than it was, the main timeline zeroes in on the least dramatic sequence and the only framing device seemingly required is a few terse captions.

Which would all be fine – or at least tolerable – if the execution weren’t so grindingly tedious. The worst offenders are the lengthy scenes at the Hearst mansion where everybody rattles out historical exposition alternating with ersatz versions of famous bon mots, carefully timed so as to delicately overlap. But the cadence is relentless, monotonous, deadening. There are no actual people in this room. It’s like a ride at Disneyland – we glide smoothly past animatronic versions of Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg et al, reciting their familiar catchphrases. And at the end, I feel I know Mankiewicz less well than before. A big disappointment from such a talented team.

It’s the Oscars! Just about. Finally. In some form. Probably.

Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas did the honours and read out the nominations and they’re quite an extraordinary bunch. First of all – ten nominations for Mank and no other film got more than six! That’s a big change from last year when four films got more than ten. But of course, the film which got the most nominations got no Oscars (The Irishman) and who’s to say that history won’t repeat itself?

And – in an outcome sure to get some members of the community foaming at the chops – this is a record-shatteringly diverse crop of nominees. Two whole women nominated as Best Director (the sixth and seventh ever female director nominees). Only one American man nominated as Best Director. Only one white American nominated as Best Actor, only one white American nominated as Best Actress. Two nominations for Borat including Best Supporting Actress for Maria Bakalova.

And Glenn Close has earned another nomination, bringing her total to 8. In 1985 Geraldine Page finally won an acting Oscar at her eighth attempt. Close already has the record for nominations without a win with seven. Can she duplicate Page’s feat?

Of course, it’s still the Academy so nothing for Delroy Lindo and in fact nothing at all for Da 5 Bloods except Best Original Score, which seems like even more of a kick in the nuts than just ignoring it completely. And there’s something slightly screwy going on in both Best Director and Best Editing. One of the five Best Director slots has gone to Thomas Vinterberg, whose film Another Round while it is nominated as Best International Feature is not nominated as Best Picture. And Best Editing – often a very good predictor of Best Picture – doesn’t include any mention of Mank. Which means the films which currently have the nominations trifecta of also being in the running for Director and Editing are Promising Young Woman and Nomadland. Make of that what you will.

Here’s my run-down of the Best Picture nominees…

The Father (w. Florian Zeller, Christopher Hampton; d. Zeller; Anthony Hopkins, Oliva Colman. Also nominated for Actor, Supporting Actress, Screenplay, Production Design, Editing.)

For me this was the biggest surprise. Hopkins was widely touted as likely to get Best Actor but it wasn’t expected to get anything else. It got nothing at the Golden Globes, nor the Writers Guild, nor the Producers Guild, nor the Directors Guild. And yet here it is with six nominations. Rum.

Judas and the Black Messiah (w. Will Berson, Shaka King; d. King; Daniel Kaluuya, Lakeith Stanfield. Also nominated for Supporting Actor [Kaluuya, Stanfield], Screenplay, Cinematography, Song.)

Another one I didn’t see coming, but this time because I was barely aware of it. Kaluuya’s nomination as Best Supporting Actor is odd as the studio campaigned for him as Best Actor but the voting put him up against Stanfield in the supporting category. I don’t see this as a front-runner for Best Picture though, and I haven’t see it yet.

Mank (w. Jack Fincher; d. David Fincher; Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried. Also nominated for Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Production Design, Score, Costumes, Makeup, Sound.)

I honestly thought this was pretty poor. A longer review will follow but it’s trying to tell a true story in which nothing much happens, so it resorts to making a lot of shit up in order to try and manufacture some drama, and what we’re left with is impersonated celebrities walking in and out of rooms reciting their famous bon mots at each other. Did not got a nod for its screenplay but could still do very well in other categories, and must be seriously in the running for Best Picture.

Minari (wd. Lee Isaac Chung; Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Alan Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn. Also nominated for Director, Actor [Yeun], Supporting Actress [Youn], Screenplay, Score.)

This has been getting sensational reviews and being a story about Asian immigrants, won’t suffer from the need to buy into another culture which you might have expected to hurt Parasite’s chances. Who’d have thought that Glen from off of The Walking Dead would be an Oscar nominee?

Nomadland (wd. Chloé Zhao; Frances McDormand, David Strathairn. Also nominated for Director, Actress, Screenplay, Editing, Cinematography.)

Definitely the one to beat if nothing comes up Fincher – and McDormand should get another speech ready too.

Promising Young Woman (wd. Emerald Fennell; Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie. Also nominated for Director, Actress, Screenplay, Editing.)

Only five noms – but they’re all in major categories. This is probably a shade too trashy to win big but could nick screenplay for Emerald Fennell and Mulligan has a slim chance. Review to follow.

Sound of Metal (w. Darius Marder, Abraham Marder, Derek Cianfrance; d. Marder; Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci. Also nominated for Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Sound, Editing.)

This sounds terrific and I’m so pleased for Riz Ahmed, but it faces very stiff competition in practically every category.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (wd. Aaron Sorkin; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Sacha Baron Cohen, Daniel Flaherty, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella et al. Also nominated for Supporting Actor [Baron Cohen], Screenplay, Cinematography, Song, Editing)

Another Oscar film for Ali G! Who’d have thought it? Full review to follow but this is slickly entertaining stuff, on a level with Argo or The King’s Speech and in a year with so many detailed, personal films, that might not cut it in any category, not even screenplay where it has the best chance.

Reviews of the three I’ve seen and the five I haven’t (and possibly a few more besides) to follow in the next few days and weeks…

As with COVID-19 (and so many things) at this stage I’m resigned to just having to ride it out. Apparently, pandemic-related filming restrictions mean this year we will get even fewer episodes of Doctor Who than were planned. I can’t say that’s a bad thing. The sooner we get through this era, the happier I will be. Dreams of Chibnall leaving early and Whittaker staying on seem to be just as fanciful as hopes that the UK government won’t screw up the vaccine rollout or the Brexit would be averted at the 11th hour. So, now we have to make the best of what we’ve got.

And – lo! – here are all the Chris Chibnall writing flaws we’re used to. Let’s take them one at a time. Firstly, he sequesters his stories into shooty-bang-bang scenes and let’s-calmly-talk-about-our-feelings scenes and the two never affect each other. Let’s-calmly-talk-about-our-feelings scenes make for good therapy but lousy drama in the first place. What’s worse is that there’s no interaction. In good writing, if you do choose to take a break from the action in order to explore a character’s emotional state, those emotions are products of the action scenes, and the conversation affects the choices that the characters make when the mayhem starts up again. Almost like it’s, I dunno, the same story. Here, none of the characters moping about the Doctor being there or not being there has the slightest bearing on the battle against the Daleks, so all that happens is that the talk-about-your-feelings scenes make the shooty-bang-bang scenes seem silly and the shooty-bang-bang scenes make the talk-about-your-feelings scenes seem dull.

And Chibnall inelegantly carves his story into unrelated segments temporarily as well as tonally. The massive cliffhanger at the end of the last episode promised us a story about the Doctor’s escape from prison as the (ugh) “fam” cope with life without her back on Earth. You know, the way that the cliffhanger involving the sudden appearance of Catherine Tate in a wedding dress was followed by a whole story involving Catherine Tate in a wedding dress. Here, the business of the Doctor being in prison is dealt with in its entirety in the first 15 minutes, never to be referred to again.

And what’s the point of bringing back a beloved character from an earlier and better-written incarnation of the show, if you can’t use that character to rob the Doctor of agency and generally belittle the character? As if the Doctor couldn’t escape from a Judoon prison on her own. As if!! This, by the way, is the only plot function for Captain Jack, even though he continues smirking around for the rest of the episode. Meanwhile the (ugh) “fam” discover there is something Dalek-y going on and massively fail to do anything useful to stop it.

There’s a lot of good story to be told about what travelling with the Doctor does to you, and what happens when it stops. But there’s so little depth to these characters, so little specificity in the writing, that all we get is that a) they look a bit mis and b) they are utterly incapable of useful action without the Doctor there to back them up. Which not only makes me wonder what the Doctor sees in them, but casts the hinted-at spin-off, The Adventures of Graham and Ryan in a different light. How long you think they’ll last with only psychic paper to back them up? A week? A day?

Speaking of characters with so little depth, and padding the running time with story threads which lead nowhere, the supporting cast of IT whizz Leo and soon-to-be-PM Jo are incredibly thinly drawn even by Chibnall’s standards. In a relentlessly uninteresting prologue, fixated on details about how the Dalek from last year’s special ends up where the plot needs it to be, there is not one hint of character detail beyond a passing reference to a generically poorly mum. This laborious sequence again never pays off, and is the least interesting, most needlessly complicated way of reintroducing the Daleks imaginable. Any other writer would have whipped off the sheet to reveal the creature, dealing with how it got there in a throw-away line, so we could have more of the actual narrative. But somebody gave Chibnall 75 minutes to fill which is why the story doesn’t start for the first 15, ends 15 minutes early and the schedulers have to pad with three minutes of trailers after it’s over.

And, christ, these characters are thin. IT whiz kid is young and Does Technology, manipulative politician is manipulative and political. Neither of them gets any growth or is altered by events in any way, and both are mown down by Daleks as soon as they’ve fulfilled their plot function. There’s barely even any conflict between the three co-conspirators. And, if you’ve come to the conclusion that Dalek-remakes-itself-by-possessing-human is literally the only Dalek story you’re capable of telling, so – fuck it – you’re just going to do it twice in a row, maybe don’t spend the first ten minutes of your screen time reminding us how fresh this all seemed last year.

Most of the rest of the episode just consists of the (ugh) “fam” trudging around after the Doctor, en masse, barely differentiated, lucky to get a line of dialogue here or there. There’s a moment in the Dalek factory, where for a second I thought the episode was going to take a turn for the hugely better. One of those Dalek mutants plops down onto Jack’s back and begins trying to take him over – you know in exactly the same way that they did last year, but then we’d never seen them do that before.

Consider what might happen if a Dalek mutant had Jack Harkness under its power? A Dalek mutant with all the hate and ferocity of a Dalek but in the body of a man who cannot be killed. The mind reels! Luckily, Chibnall was smart enough to see the possibility of a really good story coming and quickly nipped that sucker in the bud. Whew. The whole scene was just there to up the shooty-bang-bang quotient of the story. It didn’t matter that Yaz and Jack were almost taken over and it didn’t matter on whose backs the Dalek mutants landed. Lucky escape for all concerned!

Speaking of shooty-bang-bang, what happens next is basically horrible. Dozens of Daleks, whose only interest is in purging the streets of England of non-Dalek life exterminate the shit out of everyone. This is never reset, or retconned away. Hundreds of people died, maybe thousands. But nor is it ever referred to again. The Daleks end up defeated. Everybody happy. But Yaz, and Graham and Ryan aren’t even curious about whether any of their family or friends is among the prodigious towers of corpses. How long will Britons be burying the dead in mass graves for? For how long will the mourning last? What effect will this slaughter have on the national psyche? Who cares? Happy New Year!!

And then, just briefly, against all the odds, the episode did start to get good, or at least interesting. The Doctor’s plan – to summon bronze Daleks to see off the cyberpunk Daleks – is, if not wildly original, then at least arrestingly insane. It doesn’t sound very much as if it’s a product of her long incarceration, nor her newly-complicated family tree (the first, as noted is never referred to again; the second is referred to twice, firstly to dismiss it entirely, secondly to establish she’s angry, but that anger never becomes a plot point) but it is a suitably desperate measure to deal with a desperate situation. And then, Mr Big goes and fucks it up. That’s actually exciting!

While this is straight out of the Harry Ellis school of sleazy negotiations (so it appears Die Hard is actually a New Year’s film) it does fit with what little we know of Mr Big’s character, and Chris Noth sells it hard. And the eventual resolution with the spare TARDIS disguised as a police box is neat. Like a stopped clock, Chris Chibnall can’t help but write an actual story every so often, as hard as he seemingly tries not to. But if anything, this ends up being too easy, too brief. There’s no cost to any of the people we care about, whereas the cost to others is so gigantic, we can’t even contemplate it.

This all looks pretty good, I suppose. Director Lee Haven Jones keeps it all moving, Jodie Whittaker does what she can with the very limited opportunities the script offers her (first relegated to being Jack’s companion, then snapping back into generic anydoctor mode, with no hint of either of the two different massive traumas she’s just faced) and Chris Noth pitches his pantomime villain at the right level. But none of it resonates, none of it surprises. It’s Doctor Who by the numbers, but written by someone who can only count on his fingers.

And then, some people leave the TARDIS.

The Doctor, incarcerated for decades, manages to return to her (ugh) “fam” after an entirely arbitrary period of ten months. The Doctor bringing back Rose a year late in Aliens of London was devastating, drove a long-standing wedge between him and Rose’s family and served to introduce the idea that travelling in the TARDIS can sometimes come at a cost. Here, as noted, the supporting cast is never more than a bit down-in-the-dumps without the Doctor, and incapable of executing any kind of useful planet-saving plan in her absence. But the length of their separation and their reaction at the end of the story all feels completely random.

Ryan’s been a bit glum for much of the preceding season, but the character is so tissue-paper-thin and Tosin Cole so determined to underplay that it’s impossible to glean anything specific or interesting from his journey through the story or his decision at the end of it. His departure I guess makes sense if you squint at it, and thus so does Graham who wants to look after him. But Yaz seemed the most betrayed when the Doctor vanished and yet bizarrely she’s the only one who’s staying. In the hands of another showrunner, I might be excited at the possibility of this unhealthy attachment being further explored. What does Chris Chibnall have in mind for next year’s batch of episodes? Fucking John Bishop.

Fuck me, that was rough.

My final rankings are as follows…

Best of a profoundly sorry bunch was The Haunting of Villa Diodati () which actually had some thematic unity and dramatic power to it.

Praxeus () and Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror () are thin but they basically work. Spyfall () was nonsense but it was fastmoving and the surprise reveal of The Master was well-handled. Can You Hear Me? () and Orphan 55 () are both mis-fires. Ascension of the Cybermen () showed some promise, but the finale isn’t worth any stars at all because it wasn’t a story. Fugitive of the Judoon was the story I enjoyed most as it was on, despite its maddening flaws. Whether it’s still worth the 4.5 stars I gave it then is up for debate.

This compares to the noble burghers of GallifreyBase as follows. Averaging their scores out of ten, we get the following. They put Fugitive top with 8/10, then Villa Diodati close behind on 7.9. Ascension and the two parts of Spyfall are next, all scoring in the mid-7s. Tesla, The Timeless Children and Can You Hear Me are all in the mid-sixes and Praxeus gets 6.1 before Orphan 55 rounds out the series with a pretty poor 4.8. What these averages don’t reveal is the enormous number of ones (balanced by a fair few nines and tens) for the finale which really has proven to be divisive.

At the end of his first series “I don’t read reviews” Chibnall suddenly seemed to realise that his plan to treat this as a brand new programme with no past, and to never reference the show’s 57 year history had been an error and so he threw the lever so far back in the other direction it snapped off in his hand. What the hell this means for Series Thirteen is anyone’s guess. I suppose I’ll still be watching. And hoping.

This isn’t so much a review as a collection of disorganised rambling thoughts. I can only assume Chris Chibnall would approve.

The current showrunner of Doctor Who appears to be incapable of structuring a story. The companions are once again shunted off into a side quest which is boring on its face (running away from Cybermen, hiding from Cybermen, mysteriously not being shot dead by Cybermen). The Doctor is completely passive throughout. Absurd plot elements such as a so-called “death particle” are introduced arbitrarily, their abilities never defined, and then they are written out when convenient.

The current showrunner of Doctor Who appears to be allergic to drama. If we absolutely have to disinter the foundations of the central character and make what was once so appealing – those lovely mysterious origins – so much more prosaic and dull, then could we not at least find some way to do it which has a bit more power to it than the Doctor being shown a slide show? And how does the Doctor escape from her confinement? She plays herself a clip compilation of old episodes of Doctor Who. Does she literally fanwank herself out of jail??

The current showrunner of Doctor Who has decided to have three companions and has forgotten why. I don’t think we even see Ryan back on Earth. Why should we bother? He’s a nothing character. A space where a person might be.

The current showrunner of Doctor Who is impervious to the dramatic possibilities of his own ideas. Committing, for whatever boneheaded reason to putting a piece of the Doctor’s DNA inside every Time Lord, he then continues to write a story in which there’s a piece of Time Lord in every Cyberman, but the implications of this are never addressed because let’s just blow them all up instead. Not by the Doctor though, ugh, yuck, violence. Let’s have someone else do it instead. Hurrah. I love happy endings. Never cowardly or cruel! Run away and have them all blown up by someone else. Look for a third way? Why bother?

And the stupidity mounts up and up and up. Two of the companions and some other people I couldn’t give a shit about are trapped on an impossibly vast Cyber battle cruiser. Some of the Cybermen have been activated to go and kill humans on the planet below. How many? Not sure. What about the rest? Never specified.

The humans have been detected by Cyber technology so they need to hide – and quick. Luckily, they come up with a plan to very slowly and laboriously dismantle the dormant Cybermen they happen to be standing next to. Hide all the (apparently odourless) body parts they’ve had to scoop out from the inside. Then climb inside the suits – what do you know, they’re all a perfect fit – and stand and wait for Ashad the hero Cyberman to do his rounds. On the countless floors of this enormous ship, WHICH HAS SENSORS TO DETECT HUMANS, he finally wanders into the bit where the humans actually are, potters around a bit sniffing the Cybermen and then just leaves. Phew. Now our plucky humans can escape to the planet’s surface. Not before, that would have been silly. How do they get there? Never specified.

This, for one reviewer, was the highlight of the episode.

And I could go on, and on, and on. Try as I might, I can’t bring myself to care about the Doctor’s previous lives. Clearly the interesting version of the Doctor is the one who decided to steal a TARDIS and go on the run. Previous versions apparently just obediently did what they were programmed to do by a higher power – you know the way The Doctor never would. In fact, the insight which allows the Whittaker Doctor to get her shit together and dive back into the fray (for all the good that does) is that her past doesn’t define her. How can it? Her memory of being all those other incarnations has been wiped. So, it hasn’t changed her at all, then? And all that build up was for… nothing, I guess. Why should we care? Why should she care? Why should anyone care about all this bullshit?

It hasn’t “broken the show”, because it’s all just demented fan theory nonsense that doesn’t mean anything either while it’s on, or for the future of the programme, or its past. But I guess at least we know where Chris Chibnall stands on the Morbius Faces Debate now. Next year – the UNIT DATING REVELATION THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING. “Doctor, every calendar you thought you knew, was a lie.” Etc, etc. Continued on page 94.

And I’m sorry Sasha, but I’m really bored of this performance now. Third time out, there’s no gas left in the tank. While Michelle Gomez’s Missy revealed layer after layer in writing and performance, this time around, the actor repeats the same pop-eyed ranting and the writer just turns the character into his own personal avatar. “You miserable fans! Quake in fear as I threaten the very nature of your realities! Ha ha ha!” He’s so keen to make the Master the hero of the story (he does have agency after all, which is more than can be said for any other character) that he has him in two places at once. Heaven forbid that the Doctor should be allowed to investigate her own back-story.

And like all good writers, with two charismatic mega-villains, facing off against each other, he just unceremoniously writes one out in a flat second when he’s run out of ideas. Ashad, the paranoid Cyberman, brilliantly played by Patrick O’Kane, reduced to a magic mega bomb to end the story with.

It’s all so stupid and pointless, that it’s barely worthwhile trying to summon up the energy to point out all the plot holes. How did the Master find Gallifrey? Never explained. How did he manage to get past their defences and kill everyone? Never explained. How does this enable him to discover the Doctor’s boring origin story? Never explained. Why are portions of Gallifrey’s darkest secret which must never be revealed to anyone because… reasons… redacted and others not? Never explained. Why is Ruth Martin swanning around as the Doctor when Brendan has no idea who he is? Never explained. Why is Brendan’s magic power to survive death by shooting and falling unscathed, when the whole point of this stupid backstory is that what makes Time Lords special is regeneration? Why did they call themselves Time Lords when they gave themselves regeneration not Time Travel? If there are countless previous incarnations of the Doctor running around the Universe, why have our Doctor and them never crossed paths before? Why does Ko Sharmus even have a bomb which can only be detonated manually? Who would make such a thing? Who would buy it? Why is the TARDIS suddenly so vulnerable to incursion? How can the Judoon suddenly identify their quarry on sight? Are we meant to be pleased that the current showrunner remembers how funny it was when an earlier showrunner had the Doctor repeatedly say “What?” during an end-of-season cliffhanger?

This is not so much a story, it’s a mad Whovian ranting his idiotic fan fiction in your face for an hour.

And that’s who’s running Doctor Who now.

Jesus suffering Christ.

Anyway, I hear Star Trek: Picard is good.

In 1986, a teenaged Chris Chibnall appeared on BBC television to publicly criticize the 14 part serial The Trial of a Time Lord which made up the 23rd Season of Doctor Who. Now, in 2020, he is able to put his own vision of the show on screen. A vision which includes…

• The Doctor in an incongruously colourful costume
• The unexpected return of The Master
• A heavy reliance on old enemies and PR-friendly guest stars
• An alternative version of the Doctor whose provenance is uncertain, and who we don’t realize is the Doctor until later in the story
• A desolate alien planet revealed as Earth in the far future
• Evil capitalists who want to use human brains for their own purposes
• An over-arching season-long storyline revolving around Gallifrey and the Time Lords, which makes it hard for casual viewers to understand or keep up.
• Lengthy sections consisting of the Doctor watching Doctor Who via the Matrix instead of taking part in the story.
• In the final bumper-length episode, the Doctor and the Master disappear into the Matrix, a world of illusion where it isn’t clear what’s real and what’s not (a bit like in The Deadly Assassin).

Make of that what you will.

As to the content of this episode – I mean it defies reviewing really, doesn’t it, being mainly gibberish. Not so much a sci-fi adventure story as a mad Whovian ranting his dreadful fan theories into your face for an hour. I may have some more detailed thoughts later, but for now I’m just profoundly disappointed and shocked at the vacuous inanity of it all.

And then there’s this.

Just for fun… an alternate end to #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/JLXXCla7ni

— Nigel Auchterlounie (@spleenal) March 2, 2020

So… yeah…

Well, this seems to have gone down well with fandom as a whole. And it’s not hard to see why – classic monsters reimagined, proper jeopardy for the regulars, some Moffatian mystery with impregnable Brendan, lots of action and excitement and a doozie of a cliffhanger ending.

Me? I’m not quite so happy.

Let’s take this in stages. The basic plot begins with the Doctor arriving to save the last vestiges of humanity from the Cybermen. So far, so Utopia. The aforesaid vestiges are apparently named Ravioli, You-Alarm-Me, Fearcat, Biscuit, Fo’c’sle and – for some reason – Ethan. Nothing any of them can do, not even doughty Julie Graham, can put much life into them although Steve Toussaint does much with little.

The Doctor comes armed with a multitude of anti-Cyberman devices which she confidently deploys but none of them work. So, in plot terms, the same as if she’d turned up without them. I mean, I suppose we’ve raised the stakes a bit but we know the Cybermen are fearsome foes anyway and it’s much more in character for the Doctor to turn up in the thick of things and have to improvise. Having all her gadgets fail is not only narrative vamping (and if you like that, you’ll love the rest of the episode) it also does much more to weaken her than it does to build up the threat.

When the Cybermen make their appearance, it’s initially in the rather comical form of a swarm of flying Cyberheads. If you can stop giggling at how absurd this looks, then it’s suddenly clear that these flying drones are way more effective at finding, cornering and eliminating the humans than the slow-moving stompy Cybermen of yore. So it’s rather surprising (and convenient) that the efficient and brutal drones kill a single human and then all bugger off, job done.

The fam get split up with Graham and Yaz joining Ravioli, Biscuit and You-Alarm-Me and Graham and Yaz prove that when the chips are down a tone-deaf approach to personal trauma is all you need to get out of a sticky situation. Sadly, the script can’t make up its mind whether the plan is to vent the oxygen into space to propel them to the “safety” of a Cyberfreighter, or whether it’s instead to divert all life support power to the thrusters. It genuinely sounds as if different drafts of the script were being shot simultaneously.

Although the stuff with the Cybermen all waking up is well done (hey, cute, they look like the ones from the 1970s), the level of threat seems absurd compared to the number of humans. One Cyberman should be enough to “delete” half a dozen exhausted freedom fighters. Once you get above about six, who really cares? Having thousands just seems pointless. And just what is Ashad doing to them to make them scream? I thought he was reviving them, but in one shot, he looks like he’s murdering them.

Speaking of Ashad, his stuff with the Doctor is all much better. Again, none of this really accomplishes very much. Just as all that ultimately happens to Yaz, Graham and the numpty squad is that they move from one place where there are Cybermen to another place where there is a portal, all that ultimately happens to the Doctor and the other one is the same thing, but the Doctor and Ashad get better dialogue. Patrick O’Kane is the real MVP of this and the previous episode and Jodie Whittaker really rises to the occasion here too.

Finally, after an awful lot of running up and down corridors, we arrive at the portal. Hey! It’s Gallfrey! Oh! It’s the Master! Gosh, it’s the end of the episode. So, this is all tease and no pay-off, and it’s taken a enormous amount of screen time to accomplish precious little.

And speaking of all tease and no payoff, let’s talk about Brendan. Having channelled RTD for a lot of this series, the teaser and subsequent Brendan material is straight out of the Steven Moffat playbook – except I can’t help but think that Moffat would have got us at least to the cliff fall (very familiar looking cliffs, those, DI Hardy…) if not to the electrocution / chameleon arch / shock therapy scene before the opening titles and given us much more to go on by the episode’s end.

So as 50 minutes of television, this was profoundly unsatisfying. Lots that made very little sense. Lots of running around accomplishing nothing. No characters that really popped (although it was nice to see Ian McElhinney). And no real sense that this season arc is coming together at all. That makes this episode hard to judge on its own merits. If The Timeless Children smashes it out of the park, then that might make this seem far more effective in hindsight. If Chibnall flubs the finale, this will likely seem ever thinner. For now, 2½ stars is the most I can muster.

I’m really conflicted about this one. Much of this was very good indeed. Frustratingly good. If this is what this team can do when they try, why have we had to suffer through so much slurry recently? But there are still lots of niggles, lots of things which smack more of fan fiction than prestige television for all the family.

Let’s start with the fact that we only have ten episodes to play with and yet we’ve got two episodes in a row in which the team are stuck in spooky situations, unsure what’s real and what’s not and menaced by animated fingers. And what on earth is the point of bringing back the cold open if you don’t actually have anything to do with it? Everybody screaming makes no sense at all. It’s just stupid.

And there probably isn’t quite enough story for 50 minutes of television. The first third is all exposition and marking time. The second third is fun-and-games in The House That Jack Built. And the final third is where things really start getting good. But it’s quite a long wait and, again, while there’s some good stuff here, there’s some pretty ropey stuff too.

The eternal problem of the trio of redundant companions hasn’t gone away. Maxine Alderton does make them sound like people – and she doesn’t make them all sound like the same person. That might be damning with faint praise, but she’s the only writer to do that so far this series. What she can’t fathom (and nor can anyone else) is how to integrate them into the storyline. Yaz, who’s the most archetypal companion anyway, does do a bit of poking around, but only during the early “marking time” sections of the plot. Ryan manages to get challenged to a pistol duel – a hugely exciting development, especially for a series which is so reluctant to put any of the regular cast in mortal danger.

(Sidebar: that’s only recently struck me, but it’s really odd. One of the reasons that the end of Spyfall Part One was so effective was that it looked like all three companions were going to die. But that’s super-unusual. One of the benefits surely of having an expanded regular cast is that it gives us a lot of people who we care about who can get into life-threatening situations and need rescuing – by the Doctor or by each other. But most of the time, they just stand around comfortably. Even when plans fail such as when Rani Not the Queen of the Racnoss comes through those doors near the end of Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, the fact that Graham is in harm’s way doesn’t seem to be the point. Why aren’t all three of them constantly being menaced by buzz-saws, taken over by alien mind parasites, facing firing squads, being infected by spektrox nests and so on?)

But, then, in a truly bizarre bit of scripting, this terrifying turn is just forgotten about and never referred to again. Poor Graham, meanwhile is stuck in a subplot which involves him needing the loo. Thrill! As TV’s Bradley Walsh asks people where he can spend a penny. Marvel! At his inability to empty his bladder! Truly, this is our “the one with the giant maggots” moment.

And the guest cast are a bit thinly drawn too. With characters as big as Mary Wollstonecraft and Lord Byron to play with, I would have expected a bit more dash and panache, but – as with Rosa and to some extent Tesla – this is just decent actors reading out parts of Wikipedia at each other. And it’s truly weird to have Byron in one episode and Ada Lovelace in another and have nothing more than a single line of hasty acknowledgment to cover this. Christ, maybe they need even longer to plan the series out properly.

Now, all of this sounds like I didn’t like it, and it’s true, I was frustrated, but this episode had some much better stuff coming. Once the Castrovalva walls kicked in, the atmosphere was incredibly intense, and I did find myself starting to care about what happened to these bland people. We even got a couple of actual jokes. I laughed out loud at “Is it too late to pick another group?” True, Steven Moffat would have given us ten lines as good as that before the opening titles, but that doesn’t make it less funny.

And when the Lone Cyberman appears, it’s a genuine triumph of costume, make-up, performance and conception. True, it’s largely the same trick with a Cyberman which Chibnall already played with a Dalek in Resolution but it works even better here, and the Frankenstein allusions thankfully remain just that. We’re spared seeing Mary’s clunky moment of inspiration. But down in that cellar, backed into a corner, Jodie Whittaker shows us just what she can do as the Doctor, and just where the series has been taking her. It’s with only a trace of smugness that I report that her defining moment of owning the character comes through an epiphany that her three companions are essentially useless, but all of this stuff is actual proper drama. High stakes science-fiction adventure coupled with a real feeling for character and a genuine moral dilemma.

There’s a slight fumble towards the end as the Doctor first needs to retain the Cyberium and then, within the space of the same scene, needs to surrender it, but the ending is absolutely gangbusters. Of course she’d risk the universe to save one poet – not because he’s Shelley but because he’s a life. Because she’s the Doctor. Yes.

So, I’m tempted to give this five stars, overlooking all of the flaws in the first half – as I overlooked the gibberish science in Kill the Moon. But this isn’t as sure-footed as It Takes You Away or The Witchfinders, nor does it have the sheer brazen shock value of Fugitive of the Judoon. I think four is fair, but the last fifteen minutes were an easy five.

I mean at least it’s trying…

God, where to start with this one. Again, it’s a mix of old episodes tossed into a blender, with very little thought for how all the pieces are going to work together. The storybook exposition as well as the theme of nightmares put me in mind of Listen, the darkest fears bit is a lift from (among many other places) The God Complex and Amy’s Choice and there’s the now obligatory pointless references to Classic episodes, because Chibnall has now decided that he needs to do that all the time, instead of never as was his stated philosophy last season.

It’s heartening, I suppose, to see some attempt made to give the companions a bit of characterisation, and some attempt has been made to actually connect the inner lives of the TARDIS crew to the adventure story of the week, rather than putting the adventure on pause while somebody talks unconvincingly about their feelings, but the pacing and the construction of the early part of the episode is very clumsy, as everybody simultaneously has somewhere better to be, and then everybody simultaneously wants to come back on board the TARDIS again. And just what is it that Yaz and her sister are celebrating the anniversary of in this desultory way? Her suicide attempt? Who does that?

The main threat is original enough, I guess, but instead of that pleasing obvious-only-when-you-hear-it kind of originality, like the explanation in The Witch’s Familiar about why Daleks talk the way they do, or Rose being missed by her family in Aliens of London, this is just odd for its own sake. It doesn’t make sense for dreams to communicated finger-to-ear and even visually, this just looks wrong as the fingers pop off (all five although only one is needed) and sail aerodynamically towards their target before very awkwardly reversing course and then burrowing into the ear fat end first – you know, the way that fingers don’t.

And this is another episode which seems determined to weaken and diminish the Doctor. First she can’t cope with being left on her own. Then she can’t tell that The Terrible Zodin is using her to free his friend. And then, worst of all, she can’t even give poor Graham a hug. Even the conversation between Yaz and the other one at the end weakens the Doctor. Past companions have been so enriched by being their travels in the TARDIS, they can’t conceive of ever having to leave. This lot are worried that it’s making them lesser.

And the poor structuring continues. Having tried to make the companions’ nightmares a part of the actual story, Chibnall and co-writer Charlene James just give up and give us the (fairly weak) catharsis for Yaz after the main story is over. The actual climax is almost too stupid for words. The all-powerful immortal Zodin, who can travel at will through time and space, shits his pants at the sight of the monster he summoned into being? Give me strength. And just how did the Doctor get hold of that sonic screwdriver? Does she have Force powers now?

And yet, as frustrated – and often, frankly, bored – as I was watching this, there are flickers. Finally, somebody (I assume James) has tried to dig a little deeper into these three bland characters who stand around and let plots happen near them. The animated exposition is fun and it is new. Asking the question: what do you gain, and what do you lose travelling with the Doctor? is the kind of thing that having a bigger regular cast should give you access to – although it’s somewhat pointless if they all come up with the same answer. So this isn’t an Orphan 55 or The Very Long Walk to What is Obviously the TARDIS scale of disaster, but the general level of incompetence coming from the top is still doing its best to smother the best intentions of the rest of the writing team.

Parasite was my final film of this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees, and it came with quite the hoopla. People better-versed than me in South Korean cinema tell me that in comparison this seems very very good as opposed to exceptional, but my only previous exposure to Bong Joon Ho had been his very Hollywood (and totally demented) Snowpiercer, so I sat down with high if rather vague expectations.

I’d also tried to keep myself spoiler-free, so I didn’t even know the premise of the film, and in many ways it was the early scenes which I found most engaging. The apparently feckless Kim family, living in a squalid sub-basement, always on the scrounge or on the make – but furious at the bad behaviour of others – turn out to have a more entrepreneurial side. Following an introduction from his cousin, the son becomes English tutor to the daughter of the very wealthy Park family, whose bonkers house resembles that in Mon Oncle (although they don’t quickly turn on the fountain whenever there are visitors).

Ki-woo passes his sister Ki-jeong off as an art teacher for the other child and pretty soon, Kim père and Kim mère have replaced the incumbent chauffeur and housekeeper. When the Parks go away for the weekend, the Kims revel in their borrowed luxury. But hiding in the basement is a terrible secret, and it’s this plot left turn which gave me a moment’s pause, because although there is thematic unity here (height equals wealth and status; depth equals degradation and poverty) nothing to this point has been quite so outré as the previous housekeeper hiding her unemployed husband in a secret basement for the past four years.

Once I swallowed that, I was on board all the way to the end. There’s one plot contrivance in the climax which I felt was a little too constructed to really resonate, but for the most part this sings. The story is expertly assembled, Bong shoots it with the eye of a master and the acting is absolutely superb throughout. I was particularly struck by the Kim family matriarch (Chang Hyae-jin) and son (Choi Woo-shik) both of whom manage to transform themselves in a way which is utterly convincing for the Park family and yet the deception is perfectly clear to the audience.

There’s loads going on here about capitalism, climate change, wealth inequality and the nature of trust and deceit. The point of the title (for me at any rate) is that both families are parasites. The Kims leech off the Parks’ good natures and the Parks can’t survive without the seemingly servile Kims. I can’t help thinking that I would have appreciated this parable even more if it had avoided the shift into the grand guinol but I can’t deny that I was completely enthralled for every minute it was on.

So, despite the fact that my track record is pretty pisspoor, if you’ll indulge me, I will embarrass myself once again with some predictions. Best Picture will go to 1917 and Sam Mendes will also take Best Director. As luck would have it, I also think this is the most deserving film of the year, with shoutouts to Little Women and Parasite, coming in a close second and third. While it’s just possible that Bong will pinch Best Director, no foreign language film has ever won Best Picture and if Roma can’t do it than I don’t see Parasite succeeding. 1917 seems to have all the momentum anyway.

I did not like Joker at all, but Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is exactly the kind of showboating so often rewarded by the Academy, and provided it doesn’t win either Picture or Director, I’ll allow it. Of those nominees, I’d probably give it to Adam Driver, but it’s a crime George McKay isn’t nominated. Best Actress can only go to Renée Zellweger who has no doubt been working on her speech since June.

Best Supporting Actor likewise has Brad Pitt pretty much nailed on, and fair enough I suppose. Best Supporting Actor is tougher to call. I’d love to see Scarlett Johansson lift the statuette on Sunday but Laura Dern seems to be a lock. Best Original Screenplay should go to Rian Johnson for his delightful and inventive Knives Out, but I suspect Tarantino will nick it. Best Adapted Screenplay must surely go to Greta Gerwig for her magnificent Little Women script or there’s no justice whatever in the world.

See you in a few days for a detailed explanation of how and why I got it all so wrong.